Phoenix Tailings wants to pull rare earths from mining waste

Tomás Villalón Jr. grew up in San Antonio, Texas, but the image he carries is of Monterrey, Mexico, the steel and metal fabrication hub his family came from, with smog hanging over the city. Even as a child, he understood that breathing that air was a problem. He is now the chief technology officer of a company that extracts rare earth metals from mining waste.

Villalón studied materials science and engineering at MIT. He began thinking about sustainable metallurgy as a senior, while working at Boston Metal, an MIT spinoff focused on decarbonizing steelmaking. "I'm motivated because I've seen what metal-making does," he says. In 2019 he co-founded Phoenix Tailings with Michelle Chao, Nick Myers and Anthony Balladon. The company has developed what it describes as a proprietary electrochemical technique for extracting rare earth metals from mining waste.

The scale of the problem is the starting point. Villalón says the mining ecosystem produces several billion tons of waste. "We have to get rid of this pollution," he says. The profile does not explain how the electrochemical process works step by step, and it does not say what rare earth output the process reaches, or at what cost. According to the company, the technique generates no toxins and is carbon-free when fueled by renewables. Those are the company's own assertions, and the profile cites no independent test of them.

What would change if the claims hold? For mining operators, the promise is a way to recover metal from material they already handle, rather than treating it only as waste. For the communities near those sites, it would mean less material left in place and, according to the company, no toxic output from the process itself. But the profile gives no date for a plant, no location, and no customer, so the reach of the technique stays unknown for now.