Many of the materials we throw away still contain valuable elements we need for clean energy, semiconductors and domestic supply chains.
Greeshma Gadikota, a joint professor at the Columbia Climate School and Columbia Engineering, is a chemical engineer who develops new ways to recover valuable materials from industrial byproducts. Her team is exploring how materials that might otherwise be landfilled, such as industrial residues rich in silica or rare earth elements, can be refined and transformed into products needed for solar energy and other critical technologies.
“We manipulate matter,” says Gadikota, who is also director of the Lenfest Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia. Some examples involve her work turning CO2 into useful solids and extracting silica and rare earth elements in ways that could support energy, climate and environmental security. “The beauty and the creativity of what we do involves translating some of these pathways that we develop for a wide range of applications.”
Learn more about Gadikota’s work here.
This video is part of the ongoing Science for the Planet explainer series about how Columbia Climate School scientists and scholars are trying to understand the effects of climate change and helping to contribute solutions.
