Amisha Shah
Purdue University, IN·Engineering
The world produces more than two billion tons of household and municipal trash each year, and much of it ends up in landfills. As water seeps through a landfill, it forms leachate, a liquid that carries dissolved substances out of the waste, including valuable critical metals.
- Fields
Engineering
Earth & Environmental Science
Chemistry
- Topics
critical metals
metal recovery
municipal solid waste
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Jul 2028
What they work on
- Measure baseline concentrations of critical metals in leachates from US municipal solid waste landfills, which are currently unknown.
- Characterize landfill microbial communities and in-place biofilms, and test how to boost their bioleaching of metals from waste into the leachate.
- Determine the chemical forms (speciation) of metals in real and simulated landfill leachates, to guide how they can be separated and recovered.
- Fabricate ion-selective membranes with tailored chemistries, and combine life cycle and techno-economic assessments to judge the cost and environmental impact of the recovery process.
More about the research
This collaborative project, shared across three universities, asks whether those metals could be recovered instead of lost. Recovering them could turn landfills into a source of materials that face supply-chain risks, and could support a more circular economy.
Why it matters
Recovering critical metals from landfill leachate could create a domestic source of materials whose supply chains are vulnerable, while reducing waste. The process could be powered by landfill methane, which may also help curb climate change. Waste managers and policymakers could use the cost and environmental assessments to judge whether landfill metal recovery is worth pursuing. The grant notes this could matter in the US now and later in developing countries where waste output is expected to triple.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Shihong Lin
Rice University, TX·Engineering
Establish how ultrashort charge–discharge cycling at specific electrode charge levels keeps electrode voltages stable in Electrochemical Ion Pumping (EIP), an electrical method for separating salts from metals.
Sujith Ravi
Temple University, PA·Earth & Environmental Science·Early-career
Measure how solar photovoltaic panels interact with the soil and vegetation beneath them, using field experiments that grow selected crops alongside the panels.
Robin Bullock
Montana Technological University, MT·Engineering
Develop an AI-based Virtual Assay that predicts which coal refuse and ash feedstocks have high potential for rare earth element recovery.
The school
Purdue University: 43 labs on PI Pages, $932M a year on research, 833 research doctorates a year.
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