Mining the Periodic Table with Salt Water and Electricity

Most people assume recovering metal from e-waste or ore takes a smelter. This exhibit shows it happening on a tabletop. A running electrolysis cell moves copper through a low-cost ion exchange membrane and plates it out as solid metal while you watch, at room temperature, powered by less electricity than a laptop charger. The demonstration was built for a family crowd: the chemistry was picked because it produces no dangerous gases and no dangerous chemicals. Copper simply leaves one plate and grows on the other. Everything within reach of visitors is dry and safe to touch.
Around the live cell you can handle real results: vials of recovered metals and concentrates, membrane swatches you can touch, and a periodic table panel showing which elements this class of process can pull from waste streams. A short video loop shows the membrane being made from off-the-shelf materials in under two minutes.
The whole technology is open source. The build guide, the design files, and the patent license are public, so a motivated maker can leave this booth and build a working cell at home for less than the cost of a video game. Kids get to see metal appear out of a colored liquid. Builders leave with a project.

Exhibit # 26-142

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Maker

Rowow SEM TECH

Rowow is a small Florida company building open-source electrochemical technology that recovers precious metals, rare earths, and base metals from e-waste, ore, and industrial waste using electricity and an ion exchange membrane, all at room temperature. Commercial ion exchange membranes cost hundreds of dollars per square foot in the small quantities a maker can buy. We developed one that can be made from off-the-shelf materials for under a dollar per square foot, then published the full build guide and licensed the design and the patent as open hardware so anyone can build it. Everything is documented publicly: step-by-step videos, the repo, and test data.

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