“You had to walk from his office to the lab holding it with two hands, and not talk to anyone,” Dr. Chirik recalled. The experience left him with the seed of an idea, he said. “Why can’t we do this with something cheaper?”

On a spring afternoon at the Princeton lab, a graduate student toiled away at a glovebox, a vacuum chamber that prevents the iron from rusting. Rust is a potential downside of using iron in manufacturing, and controlling it could prove challenging and expensive. “We’re not talking about making a dish of spaghetti at home,” Dr. Chirik said, referring to the volume of chemicals involved when doing reactions on an industrial scale. It remains to be seen, he said, whether concerns about the use of an “air sensitive” substance outweigh concerns about the costs and environmental impact of precious metals.

There have been other hurdles. Dr. Chirik showed two small dishes of silicone flakes, used to make envelope glue. One he made using iron, the other platinum. They were indistinguishable. Getting them that way, however, was no easy task — it’s taken nearly a decade of work.

“One of the reasons most of us got involved in this type of chemistry is that compounds that have metals in them turn really cool colors and it’s fun to watch,” Dr. Chirik said. “But if you’re making something that’s going to go in a consumer product, the glue on an envelope, the bottom of a shoe, an ingredient in shampoo, you really don’t want it to be black.”

Chevron and Momentive, a silicone manufacturer, are financing Dr. Chirik’s work. Merck is also a partner in the research. (Many drugmaking processes rely on rhodium or palladium.) One product in development is a fuel-efficient tire that employs a new, cleaner process, with no byproducts, by using iron instead of platinum.

Dr. Hartings, of American University, believes that using abundant materials where possible could free up the scarcer materials for applications that truly require them. “There’s less of an argument to do crazy mining when you’ve got something else that works just as well,” he said.

Researchers in Dr. Chirik’s lab are also hunting for ways to use catalysts to convert nitrogen from the air into forms used in various products, from fertilizer to carpet fiber. The current method, the Haber-Bosch process, is so energy-intensive it accounts for 1 percent of all global energy use.