Every tonne of bauxite you mine comes with another tonne or so of red mud. It's a toxic sludge that isn't much use to anyone - at least until you add bacteria.
Using synthetic microbes, researchers like Denys Villa Gomez, Rosemary Gillane, Fernanda Soto Montandon, and Luke J Webster can help clean up mining waste while extracting fragments of nickel, cobalt, gallium, and other rare earth materials that would have otherwise laid dormant.
Here's a look at how biohydrometallurgy works, and how teams at the Australian Institute for Bioengineering and Nanotechnology AIBN are using it to secure valuable rare earth minerals.
Dr Denys Villa Gomez
