Tikal Industries, a Chicago-based company that works to find ways to visualize industrial waste streams, has created the Bluerock Filtration system, which extracts rare-earth minerals from discarded electronics.
Earlier this year, the project was among 10 finalists in the 2025 E-SCRAP prize, a nationwide competition from the U.S. Department of Energy, for which the company received $50,000 in funding.
“The Bluerock Filtration technology submitted is an electrochemical cell, specifically capacitive deionization, that’s designed to selectively extract certain critical minerals mostly rare earth elements from electronic waste, essentially extracting additional value from recycled electronic waste,” said Christian Guerrero, CEO of Tikal Industries. “It’s kind of like a reverse battery. In a battery, you have an electrode and you’re passing electrons from the negative to the positive side.”
Capacitive deionization works in the opposite way, with electrodes made of carbon or another conductive material, he said. Applying a voltage creates a capacitive field that draws ions to them.
“That’s the functional principle of how Bluerock can remove ions from the waste stream,” Guerrero said. “What makes it different from other e-recovery methods is that it is a continuous process and easier to integrate into industrial scale.”
The system specializes in the selective recovery of high-value critical minerals from aqueous leach solutions commonly used during the processing of electronic scrap and will integrate into existing e-scrap recycling operations. Thanks to a modular design and enhanced tunability, recyclers will be able to target specific metals with precision, capturing elements that are often lost with conventional methods.
Tikal Industries is best known for turning industrial scrap into construction material. Among the scrap the company works with are industrial water treatment sludge, fly ash and certain types of e-scrap, and it has process technology it is developing to turn them into suitable materials to make cement.
“Part of the big process to do that is eliminating contaminants,” Guerrero said. “Because these things are waste streams, there’s a lot of things we need to remove, particularly things that can negatively affect the performance of the cement. And that’s really where the Bluerock process came in. A lot of the things we needed to remove are heavy metals.”
Part of Tikal’s philosophy is to be sustainable wherever possible, and to avoid the acids and other potentially harmful materials used to remove heavy metals.
“That was the catalyst of the electrochemical cell,” Guerrero said. “In our process, for a lot of the feedstock, we need to remove certain organic contaminants, but also a lot of metal contaminants. So as we’re developing the Bluerock process, the goal is to not only be able to remove the things that can negatively affect the cement, but also extract additional value, turning those into additional revenue for the company and utilizing even more of the waste that we could if we were just doing cement.”
In theory, the filtration system can pull out anything with a charge; anything ionic, which has both its pros and cons.
“It’s very good at eliminating a lot of things so we mostly target rare earth elements, but we’ve also done some early work with other valuable metals, particularly nickel,” Guerrero said. “We also have explored on a small-scale removing things like nutrients, positively charged phosphates and things like that.”
The Bluerock system is in the pilot-scale phase of testing, though it is showing encouraging results. The hope is that it will move toward broader commercialization in coming years.
“There’s still quite a bit of R&D that needs to be done, particularly on the selectivity side,” Guerrero said. “The process itself works pretty well; it does a good job extracting conductive ions and metals from water. The biggest thing we are trying to work through with R&D is improving the selectivity to ensure we can target specific elements.”
The company is looking for industry partners who may be a bit better at the material science aspects, and is seeking other grants, but there is already substantial interest on the e-scrap side with many interested in trying the technique once development is finalized.
“For the Bluerock process, we hope to get this to pilot at an industrial facility in the next two to three years,” Guerrero said.
