University of Birmingham

Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements and Critical Materials

The Birmingham Centre for Strategic Elements & Critical Materials encompasses expertise from across the University of Birmingham and the Birmingham Energy Institute in biosciences, chemical engineering, chemistry, economics, law, materials science, physics and social science.

Experts within the centre are developing new science to address the challenges posed by supply constraints on strategic elements and critical materials. We are working on the development of new recycling processes to enable the recovery of critical materials from end of life products, mining wastes and even road dust. We are looking at ways to re-use components containing strategic and critical elements, and developing new processing techniques to use these materials more efficiently.