Turning Waste into Treasure

Marie Perrin, CEO, Reecover

© European Patent Office

Rare earth elements (REEs) are key to both the digital and the energy transitions but their sourcing by mining bears significant environmental and geopolitical issues. Reecover’s vision is to tackle these issues by providing the technology to recover these critical metals from waste. The Swiss cleantech start-up company, born in 2023 in a research lab at ETH Zurich, takes advantage of a unique patented technology which allows to recover these elements from electronic waste. CHEManager asked co-founder Marie Perrin to elaborate on the innovative chemical process for the sustainable recycling of rare earth elements.

CHEManager: What inspired you to focus on the recycling of rare earth elements,? 

Marie Perrin: Reecover grew out of my PhD research which I conducted in the group of Victor Mougel from the Department of Chemistry and Applied Bioscience at ETH Zurich. I was studying rare earth elements with a very counterintuitive approach: to combine them with synthetic metallosulfur molecules, inspired from the active site of natural metalloenzymes, to unlock new properties. Which under the right conditions worked very well and we discovered new molecules with very interesting magnetic and luminescence properties. But one property we did not foresee was the ability of these synthetic metallosulfur to discriminate rare earth elements, which we could then use to separate them very efficiently. Rare earth separation has been a chemistry challenge for the past 200 years, and the market need was obvious. Maria joined as a business partner and brought the commercial perspective we needed to take this from lab to venture. I am currently enrolled in the ETH incubator program for deep-tech startups, the ETH Pioneer Fellowship, which provided us with initial funding and allowed me to transition from academia to entrepreneurship with the best support and training possible.