Getting there means fording a river into Sabah’s Kinabalu Park, where scientists are coaxing a shrub to drink metal.
Crush a leaf and a filter turns pink — nickel detected.
The pitch is phytomining: grow plants that are hyperaccumulators on Sabah’s ultramafic soils, burn the biomass, recover the metal.
Early figures hint at roughly 100kg of nickel per hectare, but seedlings need water and scale is the real test.
Phytomining, often called agromining, has been around for decades.
The idea traces to US government agronomist Rufus Chaney in the early 1980s, with pilot trials and patents in the mid-1990s.
Four decades on, it works in plots, yet growth rates, uptake and processing economics still limit mass adoption.
Even so, researchers are tweaking plant chemistry to lift yields, keeping the method in play as a cleaner, land-healing route to battery metals — if field numbers add up.
Malaysia is giving it a shot.
Curious whether pink leaves can power EVs? Watch the France 24 English TV news clip above and see for yourself.
