ABOUT THIS EPISODE
Rhodium costs €240,000 per kilogram — the price of a small apartment in Berlin — and today's filtration materials are often more expensive than the metals they're designed to recover. That economic paradox has kept breakthrough adsorption technology trapped in academic labs for decades, unable to scale for industrial use.
Rhea Machado, co-founder and CEO of Porelio, explains how her team cracked the production problem that has plagued functionalized ordered mesoporous silica (FOMS) materials. Originally developed for catalysis research at BasCat, the joint BASF–TU Berlin lab, these nano-scale silica structures offer 400–800 square meters of internal surface area per gram and can be engineered with chemical "arms" that selectively bind target molecules. Porelio's innovation isn't the material itself — it's a scalable, cost-effective manufacturing process that makes industrial deployment viable. The company is targeting two markets: PFAS removal from wastewater, where short-chain "forever chemicals" slip through activated carbon filters, and precious metal recovery from pharmaceutical and chemical process streams. Both applications hinge on the same principle — designing surface functionality to capture specific molecules while leaving everything else untouched.
**Key Discussion Points:**
🧪 Why adsorption materials have been stuck in the lab — producing at €50,000/kg makes even palladium recovery uneconomical
🌊 The PFAS challenge — ultra-short chains like TFA require a polishing step beyond activated carbon
⚙️ Scaling chemical production — the €2–3M pathway from pilot plant to multi-ton commercial output
🔬 Product-market fit in process chemistry — why trust and shared economics matter more than spec sheets
💰 Metal recovery economics — how concentrating trace rhodium or palladium from liquid streams unlocks recycling value
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