Recovering critical minerals from dilute mining, refining, and recycling streams.
Photo credit: SiTration / sitration.com
SiTration is a materials company founded in 2020 by Brendan Smith and MIT professor Jeffrey Grossman. The company commercializes porous silicon membranes and electrochemical systems derived from MIT research. Its platform is designed to separate dissolved metals and other valuable materials from complex liquid streams in mining, refining, lithium-ion battery recycling, and industrial wastewater.
Unlike pressure-driven polymer filtration, SiTration uses precisely engineered silicon pores and electrically controlled surface properties to select ions and particles. The company describes configurations for filtration, concentration, and electro-extraction, with the aim of recovering copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, rare-earth elements, and other materials while reducing chemical reagents, water use, energy demand, and waste. Actual flowsheets vary by feed chemistry and target product.
SiTration has moved beyond laboratory research into a scale-up facility and customer pilots, but it had not established routine, full-scale commercial mineral production as of September 17, 2026. Its August 2026 program with BHP is an on-site Arizona pilot at a historic mine, intended to test copper recovery from legacy waste streams and generate data for scale-up. It should not be described as an operating commercial mine installation or proven commodity-scale production.
Mining and recycling streams often contain valuable metals at concentrations that are uneconomic to recover with conventional precipitation, solvent extraction, or thermal processes. SiTration aims to selectively concentrate those materials, turning some wastewaters, tailings-derived liquids, and battery-recycling intermediates into feedstocks. Higher recovery and water recirculation could reduce demand for new extraction and the energy, chemicals, and waste associated with incumbent separations.
Environmental performance depends on ore or waste composition, pretreatment, membrane lifetime, fouling, electricity source, recovery yield, product purity, and what process the system displaces. Recovering more metal can also extend mining activity rather than replace virgin production. Company cost and resource-efficiency estimates are not lifecycle results, and pilot success does not establish reliable operation at commercial throughput.
SiTration and BHP announced an Arizona mine-site pilot in August 2026 to evaluate copper recovery from legacy mining material. The work follows laboratory and engineering development under BHP's accelerator relationship. It is a field pilot designed to establish performance and economics; no public source had reported sustained commercial output, recovered-copper tonnage, or verified avoided emissions by the review date.
The company opened a larger Massachusetts facility to build pilot systems and scale membrane manufacturing. MIT and SiTration materials have reported that the approach could reduce separation costs by as much as 70% for certain streams and improve water reuse, but those are application-dependent estimates, not audited results across deployed systems.
SiTration announced an $11.8 million seed round in 2024. A U.S. Department of Energy critical-materials program later selected work involving recovery from industrial sources, supporting further demonstration rather than confirming commercial maturity. Publications, patents, a facility, and partner pilots document technical progress; they do not yet quantify market-wide mineral recovery or environmental benefit.
Recovery from dilute streams
Engineered silicon systems target dissolved metals in low-concentration and chemically complex liquids that can be costly to process with conventional methods.
Multiple separation modes
The platform combines membrane filtration, concentration, and electro-extraction options so a process can be configured around a specific feed and saleable product.
Mining-water recirculation
Removing and recovering metals can support reuse of process water, although water savings and treatment requirements must be measured for each operating site.
Critical-material circularity
Applications in mine waste and battery recycling may return copper, lithium, nickel, cobalt, and other materials to supply chains instead of leaving them in waste.
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