The goal of this symposium is to provide an interactive forum for scientists from various fields who work towards novel and more efficient extraction and utilization of critical materials and minerals to enable sustainable energy technologies. Critical materials and minerals, including rare-earth elements (REE), platinum group elements (PGE), and lithium/cobalt/nickel that possess unique electronic, magnetic, catalytic, transport, and luminescent properties, are key components of many clean energy and high-tech applications that enable wind turbines, solar panels, electric vehicles, and energy-efficient lighting and transportation for accelerating decarbonization economy and realizing Net-Zero-World ecosystem. However, uneven resource distribution and limited as well as vulnerable supply chains of critical materials pose an immense risk to the development and deployment of clean energy technologies both domestically and globally. Therefore, a sustained, multidisciplinary effort by integrating scientific research and engineering innovation to develop diverse solutions across the materials lifecycle, including mineral processing, materials manufacturing, elemental substitution, efficient use, and end-of-life recycling is timely and highly needed. To address the pressing opportunities and challenges, we envision this symposium to highlight most recent trends in fundamental and applied research on enhancing functional behavior and discovery of new properties of REE/PGE-based materials, mining, harnessing, substituting, and recycling critical materials in a wide range of energy and information technology applications. This symposium will bridge expertise on theoretical materials design, materials synthesis, functional measurement/control, advanced characterization, high-throughput computations and machine-learning/artificial intelligence methods. Particular attention will be paid to advancing our understanding of how critical elements impart materials and molecules the unique properties that are valuable for clean energy and climate solution technologies; predictive design of atom-efficient critical materials for energy and electronic applications; identifying new sources or facilitating reuse and recycling of existing critical materials, and reducing and eliminating the need for critical elements.

extended x-ray absorption fine structure (EXAFS) ion-solid interactions nanoscale operando Pd Pt rare-earths recycling transmission electron microscopy (TEM)