Dr Akshay Deshmukh, University of Cambridge

A cleaner path to critical metals

The challenge

Scaling up renewable energy is essential to cutting carbon emissions and tackling climate change. Yet the transition to cleaner energy is not without its own environmental challenges, with renewable energy technologies such as batteries, solar panels, electric vehicles, and wind turbines relying on critical metals including lithium, cobalt, and rare earth elements. 

This creates a significant paradox: the technologies designed to reduce our environmental impact depend on materials whose extraction and processing can be highly resource-intensive, often involving ecosystem destruction, high water use, and carbon emissions. As demand for these minerals continues to grow, so too does the urgency to find more responsible and sustainable ways to source and use them.

The innovation

Dr Akshay Deshmukh is developing cleaner, more efficient ways to extract and recycle these critical metals. His approach rethinks traditional methods, by introducing advanced filtration systems powered by electricity to separate metals from saline solutions and recycled materials. This innovation offers a more sustainable pathway for recovering the resources needed to power clean energy technologies, helping to address the very challenges current methods create.

With the Green Future Fellowship funding, Dr Deshmukh hopes to scale up this technology for widespread use, with the commitment to ensuring that the materials underpinning the energy transition are sourced responsibly and sustainably.

The innovator

To take up the Green Future Fellowship, Dr Deshmukh has returned to the University of Cambridge’s Department of Chemical Engineering and Biotechnology, where he completed his undergraduate degree, after spending 12 years in the US. He first went to Yale University, where he completed his PhD, before moving to MIT as a postdoctoral researcher and research scientist. He started his career looking at how to purify salt water to produce drinking water, and has since focused his research on designing membranes for more complex separations.

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Clean energy depends on critical metals, but their production comes at a significant environmental cost. The materials behind clean energy should be as clean as the energy itself.