Palladium-recovery MXene sheet (provided by KIST)
SEOUL, Dec. 15 (Korea Bizwire) — South Korean researchers have developed a high-efficiency method for reclaiming palladium, a precious metal widely used across industrial supply chains, potentially offering a breakthrough in the nation’s push to strengthen resource recycling and reduce reliance on imports.
The Korea Institute of Science and Technology (KIST) said Saturday that a joint team led by senior researchers Choi Jae-woo and Kim Jin-young has created an eco-friendly palladium recovery technology using titanium-based MXene nanosheets.
Palladium, prized for its catalytic properties and used in everything from smartphones to semiconductor manufacturing, is sourced largely from a handful of countries. Industrial waste streams often contain recoverable quantities, but existing technologies struggle to extract the metal efficiently in the mildly acidic conditions common in factory wastewater—leading to significant loss.
The KIST team engineered an ultrathin sheet material densely coated with titanium oxide nanoclusters containing unsaturated oxygen. The new adsorbent captured 1,983 milligrams of palladium per gram of material within 30 minutes—far surpassing conventional commercial adsorbents, which require hours of processing and achieve capacities under 1,000 mg.
The material can be reused more than 10 times while maintaining 90 percent efficiency, and the recovered palladium-MXene composite can be directly repurposed as a catalyst for hydrogen generation, suggesting a closed-loop system for precious-metal reuse.
The process operates at room temperature and eliminates the need for strong acids, reducing carbon emissions by more than 80 percent, the researchers said.
Choi said the technology could become “a turning point in domestic resource-circulation capabilities,” making it easier to recover metals typically discarded in spent catalysts and electronic waste. KIST plans to develop modular recovery systems to support commercial deployment.
The findings were published Nov. 12 in the journal Advanced Functional Materials.
Kevin Lee (kevinlee@koreabizwire.com)
