Recycling rare earth materials

TL;DR

• The 17 rare earth elements are essential components to items that are driving the shift to electrification including laptops, smartphones, catalysts, electric vehicles, and wind turbines.

• Currently, China has a monopoly on these elements and has made it extremely difficult for these to be exported cost-effectively.

• With rare earth element mining in its infancy in the US and Europe, urban mining and recycling provide a potential solution. These techniques take electronic waste and use a combination of manual labour and technology to extract the rare earth elements and make them reusable.

• Emerging technologies could potentially increase the amount of electronic waste recycled. Companies in the UK and US are experimenting with processes that incorporate robots, hydrogen, copper salt, and organic acids.

• However, the rare earth element recycling industry will only develop if it is supported by investment, legislation, and the tech giants.

The detail

Electrification has an essential role to play in the fight against climate change, but it’s not a perfect solution. The availability of rare earth elements is a cause for concern; there are 17 vital rare earth elements: 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium, which are an essential component of everything from catalysts, smartphones and laptops to electric vehicles and wind turbines. Currently there aren’t any obvious substitutes for these elements, and they’re needed in vast quantities. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that, to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement, the demand for rare earth elements will need to increase by 40%.

This projection may still fall short. To put the rare earth element industry’s growth in perspective, in 2021, the world mined 280,000 metric tonnes of rare earth elements, which is approximately 32 times the quantities mined in the mid-1950s. Based on this trajectory, some experts predict that we will need as much as seven times more of these materials by 2040.

This is not only worrying from an environmental perspective – the mining process releases a large quantity of carbon emissions and uses a high volume of water – but there are several other issues plaguing the rare earth element industry that are equally concerning.

The Chinese monopoly

One of the most pressing issues restricting the availability of rare earth elements is that the industry is largely dominated by one country: China. The country mines 63% of the world’s rare earth minerals and controls 85% of the processing (the efforts required to separate the minerals from the rock). In fact, China has an effective monopoly when it comes to rare earth elements like Dysprosium, Terbium, Neodymium, and Praseodymium. However, a large part of its dominance can be attributed to its sustained investment in technology; from 1950 to 2018, China filed over 25,000 rare earth patents and essentially perfected the extraction process.

While the concentration of rare earth elements in one country has driven up prices and led to supply chain delays, but these issues may have been manageable if China had not made the controversial decision to ban the export of the technologies that extract and separate rare earth elements in December 2023. New bans followed in 2024; in January, China banned exports of gallium and germanium, which are used in the computer chip industry, and Beijing recently ruled rare earth elements as property of the state leading it to take control of the extraction, use, and export of all minerals.

The rest of the world will struggle to compete with China’s rare earth resources. The US, for example, only has one active rare earth mine and, in 2023, the European Commission announced the construction of the first large-scale rare earth refinery in Europe, which will be located in Estonia. The EU still imports 93% of its magnesium from China, 98% of its borate from Turkey, and 85% of its niobium from Brazil.

New mines might be a solution, but they aren’t a quick fix. Mines take decades to commercialise and the mining process itself isn’t straightforward. A large amount of ore must be extracted to access the required quantities of rare earth elements and a blend of physical and chemical processes is required to concentrate the metals and separate them from the ore.

Digging into urban mining

One solution to these supply chain issues could be rare earth element recycling. At the moment, this industry is small, and the processes required to effectively separate the elements from the surrounding waste can be costly and logistically difficult. Even so, there is plenty of material available. The world produces approximately 50 tonnes of electronic wasteeach year but only about 1% of the rare earth elements in old products currently gets recycled.

That’s where urban mining comes in. This is the term used to describe the process of extracting raw materials from electronic waste. It could include recycling lithium-ion batteries in end-of-life electric vehicles to recover their cobalt, nickel, and lithium; extracting gold and copper from smartphones and circuit boards; reclaiming platinum group metals from catalysts; and recycling rare earth elements from hard drives and speakers. The appeal of this approach is that it would create a circular economy, where everything from scrapped medical equipment to commercial motors could get a second lease of life by providing raw materials that can be added back into the supply chain.

Urban mining pioneers have found that recycling some of these materials can be surprisingly cost-effective. It’s possible to recover blocks of copper and gold from electronic waste processors in China, for example, at costs that are comparable to mining copper or gold ores. Recycling aluminium from end-of-life vehicles can also be more cost-efficient than mining. However, accessing the required technology is a challenge, especially for developing countries. Recovering rare earth elements from magnets often requires either significant manual labour or a dedicated technology.

Microbes and magnets

Emerging technologies offer hope. In the UK, HyProMag is a new short-loop recycling method based on the University of Birmingham’s patented Hydrogen Processing of Magnet Scrap (HPMS) technique. This can be used to recycle the rare earth magnets found in the motor of hard disk drives. A robot acts first; this has magnetic field sensors that can identify where the hard disk drive’s motor is located. The motor is then exposed to the HPMS technique where hydrogen is used as a processing gas to separate magnets from waste. The resulting magnet alloy powder can then be demagnetised and compacted into new rare earth alloys. The HPMS technique uses 88% less energy than mining and has already produced 300 new rare earth magnets in its pilot project.

Robotics and hydrogen aren’t the only innovative recycling solution being developed. Chemists have discovered that some organic acids can pull rare earth elements from used catalysts and the glowing phosphors that make fluorescent lights glow. These are produced naturally by the gluconobacter bacteria and are much less harmful to the environment than other metal-leaching acids. Microbes can also produce a protein that can grab onto rare earths. Even so, tests of these organic acids have shown they can only recover between 25 and 50% of the rare earths in a discarded product, which makes them a less effective substitute for hazardous chemicals like hydrochloric acid (which can extract up to 99%).

Tusaar, based in Colorado, is one company making strides in this area. It looks to recycle the rare earth elements in magnets by using low-cost acid digestion to separate the minerals from iron and other impurities. It is planning to build a plant in Denver in 2025 with initial funding from the US Department of Defence and early results have shown its methods can recover at least 95% of the valuable critical materials housed in products that would otherwise be destined for landfill.

Spotlight on neodymium

One of the most frequently used rare earth elements is neodymium. It’s used in the permanent magnets that can be found in iPhone speakers, electric vehicle motors, and offshore wind turbine generators. With this wide range of uses, it’s perhaps unsurprising that there were an estimated 7,248 metric tonnes of neodymium locked away in electronic waste in 2022, which is equivalent to 75% of the quantity needed in both the wind and electric vehicle sectors that year.

Enter the copper salt method. This can be used to extract rare neodymium from the magnets found in shredded electronics and has been found to recover between 90 and 98% of the rare earth elements within those electronics, a purity level that can be easily transferred into new magnets. The copper salt method also has less than half of the carbon footprint of mining neodymium. TdVib in Iowa has built a pilot plant using this copper salt process and has set a target of producing two tonnes of rare earth oxides each month from recycled hard disk drives.

Noveon Magnetics in Texas is another company specialising in recycled neodymium magnets. After demagnetising and cleaning the recycled magnets, it mills the metal into a powder, which is then used to create new magnets. As there’s no need to extract and separate the rare earths, Noveon’s technique cuts energy use by approximately 90%.

These innovative methods are a source of optimism but if the technology is to be scaled and extended to the developing world, government intervention will be required. Investment is one lever; Innovate UK, for example, committed £6.6 million to projects that encourage recycling and reuse of rare-earth elements in 2023 and investment from the US Department of Defence is helping to fuel Tusaar’s growth. Tax breaks could also inspire engineers to focus on the development of recycling technology rather than opening new mines.

Legislation can also be used to incentivise electronic waste recycling; New York has had a ban on curb-side waste pick-up of electronics since 2015 for this reason. The tech giants have a role to play too; the design of smartphones and similar devices with a high turnover can make rare earth extraction more difficult than it needs to be, either requiring higher amounts of energy or technological intervention.

With demand for rare earth elements increasing and electronic waste easily available, the recycling industry has great potential. Despite its challenges, recycling rare earth elements could be integral to driving electrification forward and contribute to global net zero by 2050.

— Lew 👋

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