Our planet’s health needs an acceleration in the pace of progress towards clean and sustainable technologies that are critically dependent on materials innovation. In particular, the ability to recover critical materials will be essential in order to support the energy transition to clean energies. Materials science and engineering provides the ability to understand and control matter at the atomic scale to realize optimized performance across an exhaustive set of metrics. This lecture will discuss the impact of materials design, with a focus on two examples from our recent work on resilient nanofiltration membranes, which are currently being commercialized. These new membranes can be used in a range of applications important to the recovery of critical materials, from up-concentration of highly acidic streams to more energy-efficient recovery of metals with much less chemical input to enhanced and low-cost remediation mining-influenced water. I’ll highlight recent results showing the potential application of these technologies in the leaching process and valorization of tailings.