ORNL scientist revives old tech

Carolyn Krause

Special to The Oak Ridger | USA TODAY NETWORK

Innovative separation technology extracts rare earths and lithium from electronic waste for reuse

He grew up in a rural village in the South Asian country of Bangladesh, helping to raise cows and goats and to plant, water and harvest rice, wheat, peas and tomatoes on land his father owned. He was only three months old and one of seven siblings when his father, an elementary school teacher, died in 1984. “Our mother had no academic degree and as a woman was not allowed to hold a job,” Syed Z. Islam said. “My elder brother ran the farm. We grew up without electricity and running water. We lived in a two-bedroom bamboo house. We didn’t see tall buildings. We had no car.”

He endured beatings with a bamboo stick by teachers and his elder brother who wanted him to study harder. Because he became a good student, he was allowed to take science courses.

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At a talk to a class of the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning and in a later interview, Syed Islam explained the process to extract rare-earth elements from permanent magnets and how it can help bolster the supply of these materials in the U.S., 4A

Islam

“Everybody wants to study science because of its opportunities to get good jobs,” he said.

Today, the Bangladesh native and U.S. citizen since 2024, is one of the most innovative researchers working at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

He has focused on devising separation technologies related to energy. Four companies (through six industry licenses) are commercializing these ORNL technologies. He has 13 patents and patent applications.

Islam is co-inventor with Ramesh Bhave of the ORNL membrane solvent extraction (MSX) process shown to be able to recover critical materials such as rare-earth elements from magnets in discarded smartphones, computer drives and many other devices, as well as lithium from end-of-life batteries from electric vehicles.

The extracted rare earths and lithium can be reused for the manufacture of permanent magnets for new electronic devices and lithium-ion batteries respectively.

Islam earned a bachelor of science degree in chemical engineering from Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology in Dhaka, the nation’s capital.

“It is the Harvard or MIT of Bangladesh,” he explained of the university.

In Dhaka, he said, he first experienced the wonders of electricity, cars and tall buildings.

He and his future wife (by arranged marriage), who is a scientist, did so well on their graduate record examinations that they earned full scholarships after applying to several universities in the United States.

He worked on a master’s degree in chemical engineering at North Carolina A&T State University in Greensboro, a historically Black college and university that gives scholarships to international students.

He said in an interview that he was “very excited to have the opportunity” to get a higher education in the United States and later to work at a national laboratory.

“Oak Ridge National Lab is one of the best places where I have worked, so I’m very happy here,” Islam said.

He lives with his wife and daughter in Oak Ridge.

“I moved to ORNL in 2018 as a postdoctoral research associate after completing my Ph.D. in chemical engineering at the University of Kentucky,” he said. “That’s where I split water using sunlight to produce hydrogen gas that could fuel cars. At ORNL I do mostly translational research, which means solving practical problems rather than doing basic research.”

Islam, 42, is a separation scientist who leads a team of researchers at the Soft Materials and Membranes Group in the Polymer Chemistry and Separations Section of ORNL’s Chemical Sciences Division.

He has received three ORNL Innovation Awards (2020, 2023, 2025) and an R&D 100 Award in 2024.

R&D 100 awards are often referred to as the “Oscars of Inventions.”

In October 2025, he spoke to the Friday Lecture class of the Oak Ridge Institute for Continued Learning about his childhood and his innovations in a talk titled, “Energy-efficient Membrane Separations for Energy Technologies, from Concept to Commercialization.”

Later, he was interviewed.

ORNL technologies Islam co-invented that have been licensed to industries for commercialization are “separation of high-purity copper using a scalable MSX process,” licensed to Camden Copper Holding LLC in 2026; “separation of critical battery materials from end-of-life sources,” licensed to Momentum Technologies in 2025; “forward osmosis composite membranes for concentration of lithium-containing solutions,” licensed to Element3 Resources in 2024; “separation of rareearth elements using supported MSX,” licensed to Caldara Holding LLC in 2023; “recovery of critical elements from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries with supported MSX,” licensed to Momentum Technologies in 2020, and “separation of rare-earth elements using supported MSX,” licensed to Momentum Technologies in 2019.

“In addition to rare-earth elements, MSX showed high performance in recovery of battery materials such as lithium, cobalt and nickel from end-of-life lithium-ion batteries,” Islam said.

“Momentum Technologies in Texas is currently operating pilot- and demonstration- scale facilities using our membrane solvent extraction technology to recover lithium from discarded batteries.”

The method Islam, Bhave, Parans Paranthaman and others devised that received a 2024 R&D 100 Award was titled “Direct Lithium Extraction Sorbents.”

Islam said it could be used to concentrate lithium chloride extracted from geothermal brine and other salty solutions. The ORNL technology was licensed to Element3 Resources for commercialization.

Islam and his colleagues have also been working on ways to capture carbon dioxide from the air to slow potentially devastating climate change and to improve sustainable aviation fuel made from wet municipal waste by removing nitrogen. Someday the novel technologies they develop to solve these problems may also be transferred to industry.

Membrane solvent extraction pilot plant that Syed Islam set up at ORNL to prove the novel process can extract valuable rare earths from scrap permanent magnets from discarded electronic devices.

PROVIDED BY ORNL