Dan Steingart

3 min read Dan Steingart is a professor of chemical metallurgy and chair of the Earth and environmental engineering department at Columbia. Electrochemical engineers have the opportunity to shape a cleaner, more sustainable future for a cleaner steel and iron industry. Monty Rakusen/Getty Images In the 1800s, aluminum was considered more valuable than gold or silver because it was so expensive to produce the metal in any quantity. Thanks to the Hall-Héroult smelting process, which