MR3 Technology
A Breakthrough in Metals Removal, Reclamation and Remediation

The Problem

Metal contamination in harbors, lakes and oceans; sewage sludge; mining tailings, polluted soils, acid mine water, industrial waste waters; photographic rinse waters, fly ash, and electric arc furnace dust are only some examples of existing conditions that represent environmental problems of massive proportions. However, in many instances these potential economic disasters contain commercially attractive quantities of valuable metals due to their high concentration.

At the other end of the concentration spectrum, very minute amounts of radionuclides, e.g., cesium-137 (Cs-137), Co-60 and strontium-90 (Sr-90), the by-products of nuclear electrical power and military weapon production, present an even greater health hazard to the world's human and animal populations due to their extreme toxicity even in minute amounts. These highly radioactive wastes are stored in dilute, as well as high concentration solution in large volumes of water at various sites throughout the world.

The MR3 Solution - A Biomimetic Technology for the 21st Century Biomimesis: to mimic life, to imitate biological systems.

MR3 Technology grew from medical research on how living cells separate and extract the crucial and essential metals required by all cellular life.

Microbes and other cells have highly efficient processes for the capture, separation, translocation, and placement of essential elements, such as, iron, sodium, potassium, magnesium, calcium, phosphorous, chromium, selenium, copper, nickel, cobalt, zinc, sulfur, boron, manganese, molybdenum, iodine, chloride, vanadium, tungsten, and arsenic (Note that most of these metals are important to industry either as wastes or products). If individual metals can be specifically recognized and strongly bound by special organic molecules in cells, then metals can be bound and purified by similar organic molecules (analogs) outside cells. Attaching analog molecules to a robust, high surface area substrate allows specific metals in solution to become adsorbed on the solid, where they can be concentrated and purified.

The MR3 Technology can help solve many of the environmental and industrial production problems from one end of the concentration spectrum to the other. The MR3 solution consists of a continuous operation in which several process steps, i.e., selective capture, purification, and concentration of individual metals removed from industrial, radioactive or mining wastes, have been integrated into one automated modular treatment plant.

The MR3 plant uses sophisticated and highly innovative engineering and special MR3 metal chelating media of very high affinity and selectivity to economically remove and simultaneously purify almost any metal from aqueous solutions. It operates efficiently with metal concentrations of over 100,000 mg/L to less than one part per billion (ppb). Water has been successfully cleaned of radionuclides (e.g., Sr-90, Co-60 and Cs-137) to undetectable levels, even with starting concentrations as low as parts per trillion.

In the MR3 process, hazardous metals in soils, tailings, sediments, sludge or ashes are brought into solution and thus moved from their solid state into an aqueous state in the form of a slurry. The solid materials are then separated from the metal-laden liquid as the solution passes through metal recovery modules where each module selectively and sequentially removes its target metal from the mixed metal stream.

Each separated metal is then processed individually into a non-waste, metal product (e.g., ferric sulfate [Fe2(SO4)3] for drinking and industrial water purification, zinc sulfate [ZnSO4.H20] corrosion inhibitor and for fertilizers, and copper sulfate [CuSO4.5H20] for algaecide or animal feeds). In instances where the quantity of metal may be of no commercial interest (e.g., metals from most contaminated soils), all toxic metals may be simultaneously removed from the water as a group by a single MR3 module.

Where a metal-contaminated water is the starting material and thus already in an aqueous state, the water with its metal load enters the MR3 process, and the cleaned effluent water can be introduced directly into the environment or used for other purposes. The water used internally as a metal carrier in the MR3 process is reused repeatedly. The repeated re-use of process water and the fact that the process generates little or no waste of its own contributes to the MR3 System being environmentally beneficial and economically sound.