>90% of dissolved metals are removed from circulation. 500 000 tons of hazardous heavy metals released to the environment each year. €50 billion worth of valuable metals such as gold, silver, copper, and platinum dumped every year in the growing mountain of electronic waste that pollutes the planet. €1 trillion worth of metals dumped as mining waste, with €20 billion added each year. These are just a few examples that illustrate how the world is losing valuable resources and polluting the Earth simply because industrial companies lack proper tools for metal recovery from wastewater. Today’s prevailing practice is to achieve minimal compliance with regulations by purifying the wastewater so that most of the dissolved metals, especially those defined as Critical Raw Materials are unrecoverably wasted. But if we want to achieve a circular economy and ensure sufficient supply, neglecting the resource recovery opportunities arising from improved wastewater management is nothing less than unthinkable. To address this challenge, we have developed 4D Scavenger, a novel system for selective recovery of valuable and hazardous metals from industrial wastewater. Compared to existing solutions, our technology combines unprecedented selectivity with faster reaction kinetics. This reduces the cost of metal recovery by up to 10x and thus makes the recovery of metals financially feasible for more types of metals, industrial processes, and smaller companies. We achieve this with a completely new metal recovery technology based on chemically functional porous filters. The technology uses the selective laser sintering (SLS) 3D printing technique to print the filter-like 4D Scavengers using (1) polymer powder such as PA12 that form the porous structure and (2) chemically active components such as chelating resins, ion exchange resins, adsorbents or molecular compounds that bind the desired metal ions to the 4D Scavenger.