 My name is Joseph Lorena, Periodic Products. What do we have? We have a series of plastics that actually float onto water, bind metals, certain metals, and then sink. And that's our overall technology. The plastics have very, very interesting properties. They don't bind sodium, calcium, magnesium. So we can find the needle within the haystack, if you will. Having that, we also used the properties to make a series of extraction solutions, leaching solutions that will, you can wash solids, soils, or waste with these solutions. And then the plastics can easily pull them out. So why am I here? Well, about a year and a half ago, the Phosphate Institute gave us a grant to look at pulling rare earth elements out of the phosphate waste products. And the results were actually presented about two weeks ago. And we're able to pull out the rare earth elements out of the waste products in yields of about 60 to about 70%. Prior to this, they were able to pull it out at about 5 or 10 or so percent. So if you then can open up the phosphate waste products as a source for the rare earth elements, you can, there's a lot of phosphate ore mined, and you can look at about 100,000 tons of the rare earth elements in the waste globally. So it's a huge potential market. Can you spend a little bit more about the technology and where you're on the patent application process? Okay, the company currently has four separate U.S. patents for both the, for both the synthesis of, of the family. They have, if you will, claws so we can, we can move the claws around to bind, bind various metals. We also have other, other kinds of patents, patents for the uses. So we have four, four granted U.S. patents, 22 international patents. We have three separate patent applications in the U.S. And we have a couple of PCTs outstanding in that. How are you organized right now? You are a private company, a public company? We are, we are, we are a private company, a C Corp Inc. We were actually founded in 2009. We have been funded through some of grants, but I would say friends and family. We've raised about 4.5, 4.5 million dollars today. Company is sitting with basically zero debt on the books. And the goal of our company is not to become going into mining or going into any real industry. We actually develop intellectual property. And that's what we do. And that's what we're going to, going to basically continue to do. So we find people out there in whatever market there is to partner with. And we want to apply technology that we actually have to whatever kind of problems you may have. And is there a license royalty kind of arrangement whereby you license technology either exclusively or by sector to a participant who either then resells it or builds a solution? That is correct. Any questions? Dr. Lipton? What's the cycle life? Do you strip the plastic and then you reuse it? Yes. He asked, he asked what the cycle life was. And I'll actually answer that in two ways. One, the first lot of the material was made in 2006. And we have samples of all the lots produced by that, or actually since then. And they all in fact bind to the same amount through the metals, performance metals. With the Phosphate Institute project, they actually had us do cycles, pulling the metal on and off. We were up to 10 cycles and we saw zero, zero loss. So we can pull on and off relatively quickly. The next phase of grants is actually to look at if we can actually go to 20 or 30 cycles. And then to actually recycle the lead solution so that it can be basically closed, closed loop system. One more question. Let's say obviously the surface area of your plastic is very important here. So I assume you extruded or ribbon or beads, something like that? The form right now is actually a powder plastic, an average kind of size to 250 micron size. So it's fairly large. We do have a program looking into extruding it in terms of other kinds of forms. I'm trying to think of a metric to describe. What I want to know is if I have X, volume, or plastic, what density? How much metal do I recover per unit? Excellent question. Ion exchange, you typically look at about five or so percent. We bind up to the weight. So you're looking at... And when you say... You said phosphate, do you mean for example from phosphate mining? Yes. So from the phosphate mining industry, they will actually pull out, and I want to do too much chemistry here, but the phosphate's the negative part. And the calcium, the rarest are actually the positive part. So what they do is they actually go through separations of the waste clay, the mean tails, the phosphogysm, to get to the phosph acid. The phosph acid actually has about 13 percent reporting to it. The rest of it is actually lost in the process. So we looked at all of those waste streams, if you will. And annually, you're looking at about 100,000 tons annually, not even going into the stockpiles of the waste clay or the phosphogysm or anything else that is there. Typically those are light, whereas you're finding the phosphates. The monazite that we've looked at in Florida is about 50 percent light, 25, 28 percent heavy. Okay, that's true. Any other questions or any questions? Up. Here we go. Three. Yes, I had two questions. What is the functional group on the plastic? Do you have a functional group that you add that tracks the metals to it? And then secondly, does that plastic material pick up all the rarest together or does it pick up separate ones? You have different plastic materials for each separate rare earth element. The group that we use is actually a carbonate group. And the plastic is actually composed of carbon, hydrogen, and oxygen. It does not have sulfur phosphorus, phosphorus nitrogen, so you can actually burn the plastic if you want, if the metal is really, really valuable, and you produce CO2 and H2O. You won't have any SOXs or NOXs produced through actually the burning of that. The actual technology is, the patented technology is twofold. One, because we're able to make the monomers different sizes, we have the groups that I'm using my hands to represent that as being the binding groups. And we can move those binding groups around within the monomer unit and then of course between the monomer units. So within there we have two separate binding sites. And except for the carbonyl group, there's total flexible freedom of the rest of the polymer molecule which has these huge hydrocarbon chains which give it the ability not to actually dissolve in the water. But what happens is it attracts the metal, but because of the size of the claws it can actually bind certain metals and actually not others. But then it's very fast, second order kinetics, and that's because it can actually engulf the material, so you actually see it. You float it on the water with the metal and it actually snows through and binds the metal going down. It actually engulfs that metal going down. Yes. So the second part of your question is, do we bind all the 17, the 15 plus 2 rare earths? The answer is yes. So where do we fit in this technology? We're not the technology to actually separate the rare earths. We're there to get the rare earths out of the mess so that you can actually separate them. So if you have a tailing pond that has rare earths that you can't get out with conventional iron exchange, call me. Okay, how about the uranium and thorium? Does it reject those and bind to those? It binds those also. So that'll pick those up too. So we're looking at ways to use those and there is interest in actually taking those thorium being in fact the uranium of the future in terms of being green. You had two more questions. You want me to proceed? It was... Yeah, I heard that you said the plastic floats and then sinks. Is the sinking a function of binding and becoming denser and going down? Yes. Okay, then can your binding agent sink bind to nanogasses? We haven't looked at that. And if it did then it wouldn't sink because it wouldn't have the density. Well, the density of the plastic is 0.99. It was actually designed that way. So it doesn't take much to have it sink. And all of the studies we've done on it since 2009, we've never had a problem having it sink to the bottom. And even if it doesn't, we can filter it. And how do we filter it? In the lab we use a coffee filter. So you don't need to do RO-type systems to get this stuff out. I understood that you made the feasibility demonstration a few weeks ago. Is it correct? I actually presented at the mining conference. Yes. Okay. I also understood that the rears would be fixed in the plastic. And you said if you're interested in what you collect then you would burn it. So it means that the plastic is consumable. And can you give us an idea of what's the price of a plastic? If it's one kilo of plastic as I understood for one kilo of rears, and if I need to burn one kilo of plastic for each kilogram of rears, then there is a cost here which is one kilo of plastic. So how much is it cost around? Okay. I would not actually recommend burning it. I'm not asking for commercial proposal. Right. No, no. And I'm going to say that for the rare earth metals, unless you're looking at some of the ones that are that are higher price, the process is you have the production cost. So you have to put this into the matrix, right? As to whether or not it's cheaper to extract and reuse or it's cheaper to actually burn it off to get to the metal. In the rare earth industry, we felt it was it was important to be able to recycle the polymers because of the fact that we want to get the production cost down to below about six or so dollars a kilo. We feel that if we can get your product, your kind of extraction front end extraction cost down to that amount that kind of no matter what happens in the marketplace will still be a viable way to run. Now what we don't have because this market always changes, right? What we don't have is we don't have the mining costs. We don't have to purchase the land. We don't have to permit it. We don't have to put the trees back and everything else. We get the waste products. So the front end costs aren't really there. We have one more. Right here. In the phosphate business, I think you mine the phosphate rock. You process it in flotation cells. You recover the phosphate ore, which is called matrix. Then you deslime it. And then the slimes go to a settling area. And then so now you've got your purified phosphate rock, which then goes to a chemical planet, you know, circulated with sulfuric acid. And then you produce phosphoric acid and phosphogypsin, which goes to the stack. Correct. Now, I think what you're saying is your technology can recover the rare earths from the slimes, also from the phosphogypsin, and also from the phosphoric acid. Is that correct? Excellent question. Yes and no. So let me let me go through each of the steps. The phosphoric acid, if we could get samples of the phosphoric acid, we did actually get samples. Mosaic gave us samples of the phosphoric acid. If we were able to get into the stream, the answer is potentially yes. And I know Fipper, which is which is the phosphate institute has been looking and in fact doing that. That's fruit that's hanging way up there. I'm looking for something easy, right? Starting off. The easiest thing is to do the leachates out, out of the phosphogism stacks, because the phosphogism stacks are going to have significant amounts of earth elements. You're not going to want to mine the stacks because you have to be able to stack it and you don't want to blast it to get it out. You can't touch the stacks. But what happens is the processed water, for those of you that don't know the industry, the processed water goes up to the top of the stack and percolates leaches through and they have motes around these ponds. Well, that pond is filled with rare earth elements. We can simply do a pump and treat, if you will, type of process where we go through our filters coated with plastics and we can pull this out without having to do anything. Okay, so that's actually the easiest. The second thing are actually amine tailings. We can actually leach the rare earth elements out of the amine tails. And then of course the waste clay, which is the first product that they get rid of before they, when they start sizing, 40% of the rare earth elements within that phosphate are actually sitting in the waste clay. So we want to get that clay before it settles because when it settles it's not very easy to work with. So this is where the process engineering comes in and that's really what we're doing as a next phase. We're actually working the process engineers to take the technology that we have and to efficiently implement it into an industry that had never heard of us before. Just one more follow-up if it's okay. Sure. What are your recoveries of rare earth in these slimes? What are your recoveries in the phosphor gypsum? We have to bring the pH of whatever solution it is up to one, one and a half. So the pond water is about one and a half. If you leach the phosphate rock you get a pH of about 0.7 so we have to bring the pH up. All of the metals that sit in that water at that pH are bound by the plastic. So the plastic binds 100% quantitative binding of whatever rare earth metals are left in that water at that pH. Extraction solutions, which isn't in fact optimized. So we didn't optimize for size, we didn't do any of that. Temperature was basically batched off from temperature studies. We were able to isolate to actually extract 50 to the lowest was 50 to about 75% and it varies. So for example amine tails, scandium was about 75% overall yield. So it varies for the different for the different rare earth elements. So we'll we still have some work to do in that process. But what we're doing is we're looking for, we're looking for partners to do that. Do you gang and you like okay 75% won't pass. Do you do another pass, another pass? No because we well in terms of extraction in terms of we haven't looked at we haven't looked at serial extraction. We haven't looked at any kind of conveyor belt extraction. There's no likely you can increase the yield dramatically. Absolutely. So we can't we you know the bindings there we just have to increase extraction and that's where that's why we're going we're going to to the process engineers to do this because we feel that if we can get that up even higher it's better. But Joe you believe it'd be exponential, not incremental. Every time you ran into the circuit to speak to Jack's question you would see a somewhat similar amount of recovery. Yes. Any other questions? We have been growing the list of the metals that we actually bind and that we don't find depending upon the partners that actually come to us. So people send us samples they call us and say we have this material we'd like to separate can you bind it and so we we then take it in and we run it through the profile within our laboratory and we come back and say yes we can no we can't. What's interesting is that depending upon the form of that metal into the environment in one form we may not be able to bind it and another we can. So if you look at coal ash for example we're able to bind arsenic out of the coal ash but in other forms of arsenic in other kinds of oxide forms we cannot. So it's important that we get some of your material and happy to do that and test it and we'll come back to and say yes we have this polymer that can bind this and you tell us kind of what you're looking for.