This roundup of The Conversation’s environment coverage was first published in our award-winning weekly climate action newsletter, Imagine.
Every scalable solution has to start somewhere small. With a spark of an idea, an anomaly during an experiment or, perhaps, an empty seashell on an Irish beach.
Juan Diego Rodriguez-Blanco at Trinity College Dublin has found a clever use for discarded oyster shells – a byproduct of the shellfish industry. Remarkably, these shells can capture rare earth elements from water and lock them into new minerals. Rare earth elements are an essential ingredient for the green transition – they are used to make high-performance magnets used in wind turbines and electric cars, for example. So capturing these “vitamins of modern industry” by crystallising them into the calcium carbonate of the shell (rather than just sticking or adsorbing to it) is a reliable way to recover these valuable resources for future use.
