Dear all,
This month, we highlight some valuable progress in recovering critical minerals both from waste water in Australia (Mining.com) and from permanent magnet wastes in China (Phys.org). Also some interesting moves in global supply chains as US rare earth producer MP Materials will sell material from its separation unit now directly to Japan (the Japan Times) and Indonesia becomes the biggest source of cobalt outside Africa (BNN Bloomberg). Other top news include a call for collective intelligence to improve access to water (Nature), Microsoft pushing for an industry coalition towards ethical sourcing of cobalt (CIPS), the DRC announcing some improvement of their regulatory environment in order to attract new foreign investments in nickel (The Herald) and some hopes that India could become self sufficient in nickel and cobalt supply thanks to deep sea mining (The Economic Times)
Further on the scientific front with a wide variety of innovations such as promising cathode material for high performance magnesium rechargeable batteries at Tokyo University of Science, electrical control of a single atom quantum bit at UNSW Sydney, new green coatings for food packaging developed by MFL University and Queen Mary University, new polymers with improved tolerance for heat and electric fields towards next-generation energy storage devices and new multi metal electrolyte for better solid-state batteries both at Berkeley Lab. Last but not least, a review published in Nature on recent technologies in the field of quantum-computing.
Also we chose to highlight 7 sustainability initiatives: an analysis showing that wind and solar were EU top electricity sources for the 1st time in 2022, India's $4 billion commitment towards decarbonation, OakRidge National Lab's proposal to reuse electric car batteries in order to supply electricity during demand spikes, RMIT's novel technique to make hydrogen straight from seawater, Rice University re-engineering wood as a stronger building material with no CO2, a study on the 12 million jobs created in 2021 thanks to renewable energies and finally an out of the box proposal in Nature to transport water trapped in icebergs to regions suffering from drought.
Finally 16 of our Start Up alumni were in the news this month : a regulatory approval to start production of graphene aluminium-ion batteries (Graphene MG, Australia), some partnerships announced or ongoing (Carbios – France with PVH Corp, MOMENTUM TECHNOLOGIES Inc – USA with Lancaster, UBQ Materials – Israel with Teknor Apex, EH Group – Switzerland with Snam), one sale to a bigger group (FLUENCE ANALYTICS – USA to Yokogawa), a successful funding round (MagREEsource – France), a super podcast (Sylvatex - USA) and the usual set of great press coverage (Carbios – France, GENES'INK – France, Sepion Technologies – USA, PolySpectra – USA, FREDsense Technologies – Canada, MOMENTUM TECHNOLOGIES Inc – USA, Brimstone Energy – USA, CompPair – Switzerland, GRAPHENEMG – Australia, BeFC – France, MagREEsource – France, Noon Energy - USA).
