Project Summary & Abstract
Industrial processes produce difficult to treat wastewater containing environmental contaminants in the form of
dissolved metals, many of which pose a potential health hazard to plants, animals, and humans. Examples
include mining industry effluents, wastewater treatment effluents and landfill leachates. In many cases, these
waste streams cannot be treated cost effectively. Consequently, massive quantities of wastewater are
quarantined for expensive treatment and subsequent discharge, disposed of underground, or discharged into
our surface water supply leading to a significant impact on environmental and human health. Remediation of
these waste streams is traditionally accomplished through a variety of technologies ranging from chemical
precipitation to membrane filtration. The technology used is highly dependent on the effluent type, and each
technology has intrinsic advantages and drawbacks. While chemical precipitation is simple and capital
investments are inexpensive, it is inefficient process at low metal concentrations, non-selective, and generates
large amounts of sludge which requires subsequent treatment. On the other hand, membrane filtration
technologies have high metal removal efficiencies and generate minimal waste, but they are extremely
expensive to operate, have high operational complexity, and suffer from membrane fouling. This Phase I SBIR
will combine a proprietary process to manufacture green bioinspired metal-selective sugar-based surfactants
with ion flotation technology for efficient and cost-effective removal of toxic metals and rare earth elements
(REE) from wastewater solutions. This new technology will create a saleable product of metals of strategic
importance to the US and facilitate water reuse through removal of toxic metals from waste streams.
Preliminary data using simple solutions, has demonstrated that biosynthetic rhamnolipids are highly effective at
capturing both rare earths and heavy metals, even in the presence of common soil cations such as sodium,
potassium, and calcium. During the Phase I effort, GlycoSurf and its University of Arizona partner, will work on
3 specific Aims: 1) model and real-world effluent characterization, 2) characterize metal removal from model
and real-world solutions via ion flotation, and 3) evaluation of performance and scale-up cost estimation.
Successful completion of the specific aims will facilitate the pathway to commercialization of the novel
technology to protect water supplies (and ultimately human and environmental health), while simultaneously
creating a novel pathway for the production of saleable REE.
