Collaborative Research: GCR: Bioengineered Approaches to Recover Critical Minerals and Produce Sustainable Silicon-Based Materials from Silicon-Rich Wastes

Silicon (Si) is the second most abundant element in Earth’s crust and is the key composition in many materials essential for modern civilization, including concrete, glass, ceramics, electronics (e.g., Si chips), and advanced chemical products (e.g., silicone). However, current manufacturing techniques of these silicon-based material often require high temperatures, large energy consumption, and harsh chemical processes that create environmental burdens. At the same time, enormous quantities of silicon-rich waste are generated from construction, manufacturing, mining, and other industrial sectors (e.g., over a billion tons/year of concrete, slag, and glass waste globally). Even though many of these wastes represent promising unconventional domestic feedstocks for valuable critical minerals and rare earth elements, they are largely underused, because there is a lack of selective, scalable, and mild-condition recovery techniques. Living organisms, such as diatoms, sea sponges, and some plants, offer different pathways to build complex silicon-based structures under ordinary environmental conditions with remarkable efficiency and precision. This collaborative GCR project aims to develop sustainable biological pathways for transforming silicon-rich wastes into valuable materials by harnessing these natural processes. Successful completion of this GCR project can transform multiple traditional, energy-intensive Si-based industries toward sustainability and circularity. It will enable future efforts to upcycle millions of tons of solid industrial waste into economically and strategically important technogenic Si-bearing materials while lowering processing energy and chemical footprints and strengthening domestic critical mineral supply chains. Concurrent education, outreach, and workforce development activities across five institutions will train a next-generation workforce with interdisciplinary and artificial intelligence (AI) skills for Si-based sustainable materials, waste upcycling, and critical mineral recovery. This GCR project will establish the scientific framework of an emerging Si-centered TechnoBioGeoChemistry for biologically engineered silicate processes, which converges biology, geochemistry, materials science, engineering, computational chemistry, metallurgy, AI, and ontology. Research activities will include designing biomolecules using first-principles and AI-guided computational chemistry; synthesizing and genetically engineering selected biomolecules; studying how these biomolecules control silicate dissolution, repolymerization, and critical mineral recovery; developing mild processing routes for recovering critical minerals and rare earth elements; and creating new biological and bioinspired technologies for manufacturing value-added silicon-based materials. Techno-economic analysis will be integrated throughout the project to evaluate scalability and industrial feasibility, while an AI-enabled ontology and knowledge graph will provide an open scientific framework for connecting methods, organizing data, accelerating collaboration, and supporting interdisciplinary discoveries across silicon-based materials research. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.