For millennia, alloying has been the greatest gift from metallurgy to humankind: a process of mixing elements, propelling our society from the Bronze Age to the Space Age. Dealloying, by contrast, acts like a penalty: a corrosive counteracting process of selectively removing elements from alloys or compounds, degrading their structural integrity over time. We show that when these two opposite metallurgical processes meet in a reactive vapor environment, profound sustainable alloy design opportunities become accessible, enabling bulk nanostructured porous alloys directly from oxides, with zero carbon footprint. We introduce thermodynamically well-grounded treasure maps that turn the intuitive opposition between alloying and dealloying into harmony, facilitating a quantitative approach to navigate synthesis in such an immense design space. We demonstrate this alloy design paradigm by synthesizing nanostructured Fe-Ni-N porous martensitic alloys fully from oxides in a single solid-state process step and substantiating the critical kinetic processes responsible for the desired microstructure.@en

Metallurgical production traditionally involves three steps: extracting metals from ores, mixing them into alloys by liquid processing and thermomechanical processing to achieve the desired microstructures ^1,2. This sequential approach, practised since the Bronze Age, reaches its limit today because of the urgent demand for a sustainable economy ^2–5: almost 10% of all greenhouse gas emissions are because of the use of fossil reductants and high-temperature metallurgical processing. Here we present a H ₂-based redox synthesis and compaction approach that reforms traditional alloy-making by merging metal extraction, alloying and thermomechanical processing into one single solid-state operation. We propose a thermodynamically informed guideline and a general kinetic conception to dissolve the classical boundaries between extractive and physical metallurgy, unlocking tremendous sustainable bulk alloy design opportunities. We exemplify this approach for the case of Fe–Ni invar bulk alloys ^6,7, one of the most appealing ferrous materials but the dirtiest to produce: invar shows uniquely low thermal expansion ^6,8,9, enabling key applications spanning from precision instruments to cryogenic components ^10–13. Yet, it is notoriously eco-unfriendly, with Ni causing more than 10 times higher CO ₂ emission than Fe per kilogram production ^2,14, qualifying this alloy class as a perfect demonstrator case. Our sustainable method turns oxides directly into green alloys in bulk forms, with application-worthy properties, all obtained at temperatures far below the bulk melting point, while maintaining a zero CO ₂ footprint.

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