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Dumpster diver: how I find rare-earth metals in industrial landfill

PhD student Gianluca Torta contributes to green recycling by extracting rare-earth metals from industrial landfill for reuse in electric motors.
  1. Virginia Gewin

    1. Virginia Gewin is a freelance writer in Portland, Oregon.

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Gianluca Torta sits in a junk yard on a pile of crushed cars.

Gianluca Torta is a PhD student at the University of Bologna in Italy, researching how to recover rare-earth metals efficiently from industrial waste. Credit: Elisabetta Zavoli for Nature

I was the kind of child who liked to explore chemistry, not take motors apart. Now I do both. I earned my undergraduate and master’s degrees in industrial chemistry at the University of Bologna, Italy. Pure chemistry was too abstract for me; I wanted something I could apply to real life.

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Nature 608, 640 (2022)

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-022-02192-y

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