A metal-eating bacteria could be the key to a cleaner environment.

From American Public Media, this is Marketplace Tech.

I'm Lili Dramalli.

The word bacteria doesn't exactly evoke a lot of positive images, but scientists at Cornell

University have recently discovered a novel way to replicate and use a bacteria from

Onida Lake in New York State.

It's called Shiwanella ownidensis, and it has a special affinity for the rare earth

elements, such as so-called lanthanides, which are seen as critical to the clean tech revolution.

The bacteria can be grown and used to purify rare earth metals through a process called

bio-sorption, which is considered safer and less taxing on the environment than the way

they're extracted now.

That's according to Buzz Barstow, professor of Biological and Environmental Engineering

at Cornell, and a lead researcher on this project.

So it enables us to make, we think, extremely scalable, environmentally friendly process for

separating individual lanthanides, exactly the thing you need for electric vehicles when

turbines, superconductors.

And it lets you do it, not just say in China or other sort of less advanced economies.

This is a process that we think is good enough, is environmentally friendly enough to let

us do this in the more advanced nations with more stringent environmental regulations.

So it avoids us getting into this.

My program manager, ARPAE, called the eco-colonialism, where we externalize the CO2 problem.

We say, we want to solve this environmental problem, so we're going to create these

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