Chinese plant extracts critical rare metals from lithium waste in world first

China has launched a 500-tonne production line to extract rubidium and caesium from lithium waste.A demonstration line in Jiangxi province – the world’s first with an annual capacity of 500 tonnes for continuous tower extraction and separation of low-grade rubidium and caesium – has achieved stable production, according to the Institute of Process Engineering under the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS).Rubidium and caesium are critical to aerospace, quantum computing, biomedicine, new energy and other frontier fields.