Climate change and peak oil crises have been making headlines with increasing intensity and solutions are being sought to lessen our dependence on oil. As new technologies tackle one challenge we are creating another through resource deficit. Many low carbon technologies including wind turbines, electric cars and catalytic converters require precious metals or other metals in unprecedented quantities threatening their continued availability in the middle term. These elements are being dispersed throughout our environment, making them costly and difficult to recover. This emphasises the necessity for a new approach to metal capture and use, thus increasing the lifetime of our reserves. We suggest a new direction for turning this vision into reality.

Initial studies indicate that plants are capable of phytomining platinum group metals (PGM) to form stable metal nanoparticles that are active in a variety of industrially important reactions. We intend to utilise mine tailings or waste mining waters to pass through plant beds for metal adsorption. The resulting plants will be subjected to controlled pyrolysis to yield a material with stabilised nanoparticles of PGM for use as heterogeneous catalysts. This offers an effective solution to an international problem of metal depletion and will lead to the development of a new range of naturally derived catalysts.

Project collaborators consist of a multidisciplinary team that incorporate the following essential expertise: The Centre for Environmental Research in Minerals, Metals and Materials (CERM3) at The University of British Columbia (UBC), who will gather information on worldwide distributions of PGM ore bodies, provide mine tailing/water samples and compositional analysis. The Green Chemistry Centre of Excellence (GCC) and Centre for Novel Agricultural Products (CNAP) at the University of York (UoY) will carry out the research into the plant growth, characterization and application of the catalysts. Finally, the Yale University School of Forestry and Environmental Studies (Yale) will carry out life cycle, economical and societal assessment to determine what impact the project will have on the wider world.

Potential Impact:
To ensure maximum impact of these results, the consortium will develop novel schemes and methodologies for knowledge transfer and application, for education/training and to raising awareness of options for the use of plants to accumulate low concentrations of high value metals for the subsequent conversion to active catalysts for the chemical industry. Project dissemination and exploitation of results will be carried out via a multi-pronged approach, as there are a broad range of stakeholders who would directly benefit from the knowledge generated in PHYTOCAT including: policy makers, chemical industries, mining industry, farmers, academic community & the general public.

The PHYTOCAT consortium will develop individually tailored dissemination activities, educational material and training packages incorporating the project results and case studies for all of the above stakeholders to ensure maximum impact of the project and result in the exploitation of results. These will be delivered via a conferences, publications, in-house delivery, websites, social networking tools and by engaging other organisations such as NGOs. The programme of dissemination activities will encourage cross-country and cross-sector transfer of knowledge.

A major education strategy for the PHYTOCAT consortium is the integration of educational material into academic curricula e.g. graduate level training programmes of the project partners, to inspire a new generation of scientists to develop the mindset of viewing waste mine tailings and the production of catalyst through new routes of bioaccumulation as a valuable resource. Through international organisations such as the Green Chemistry Network (www.greenchemistrynetwork.org), the consortium will seek to further disseminate educational material for use across the globe and this material will also be made available on the PHYTOCAT website. An exchange programme for employees of consortia partners and in particular young researchers i.e. postdoctoral researchers and PhD students. The exchange programme will serve to promote greater interconnectivity between the individual WPs and to enhance understanding of various technologies and new developments within the partnership.

Partners in the consortium already have a wide range of contacts in both G8 and non-G8 countries within relevant industries and these will be combined and expanded during the course of the project to facilitate the development of a database of contacts in industries capable of using the technologies. Platinum group metal accumulation will be used as a model for exemplifying the benefits of developing catalysts through the grow of plants on low value waste mine tailings and will hence encourage cross-sector transfer of knowledge.

Popular social networking tools will be used for public engagement, to promote videos developed by the consortium on the benefits of converting bioaccumulating plants into useful enviromental catalytic product.