Rare-earth recycling efforts multiply

Nearly everything that involves power generation or propulsion relies on strong magnets: smartphones, cars, wind turbines, and fighter jets, to name a few. And nearly all the rare-earth elements that such magnets require are refined from ores in China—and a hefty majority of the ores are also mined there.

To break that stranglehold, efforts to recycle magnets are mushrooming in the US and Europe. The global demand for rare-earth magnets, in particular the strongest—neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB) permanent magnets—is growing. The industry advisory firm Adamas Intelligence projects a compound annual growth rate of nearly 9% through 2040.

Although few companies have so far found recycling magnets to be a moneymaker, tempered optimism remains. “You can’t do everything with recycling,” says David Bender, managing director of Remloy, a company in Germany that sells recycled rare-earth alloy powders to magnet makers. “But we think recycling will become a major part of the supply chain in the future.” That is, he adds, “if we can keep material in the region, if we can make sure that it’s fed into recycling, if devices can be disassembled. There are a lot of ifs involved.”

Recycling satisfied less than 1% of the US demand for rare-earth elements in 2013, says Ikenna Nlebedim, deputy director of the critical materials division at Ames National Laboratory. It’s probably still less than 5%, he says, “but if well done, recycling could contribute 25% of the domestic need for rare earths.”

Other expert estimates range from less than 5% to 25% for the US and tilt higher for Europe. The numbers depend on market and geopolitical factors and on what’s counted as recycling.

Market control

Recognition of the need to reduce dependency on China for rare earths is nothing new. China controls the market in rare-earth oxides and metal alloys in part because other countries have not invested in the supply chain, says Michelle Michot Foss, a visiting fellow at the National Center for Energy Analytics. There is a “lack of production elsewhere relative to demand,” she says. “That control extends to permanent magnet manufacturing.”

Recycling efforts burgeoned in the early 2010s, after China withheld exports in a diplomatic row with Japan. After the 2010 scare, Japan secured its supply of rare earths through an arrangement with the Australian mining firm Lynas Rare Earths. In exchange for its investment, Japan gets first dibs on the company’s wares. Lynas mines rare-earth ores in Australia but outsources the chemically and radioactively messy refining processes to Malaysia.

Few other countries have supply chains for rare earths that bypass China. But most of the early recycling efforts fizzled out within a few years as renormalized prices removed the perceived urgency.

Tariffs, export controls, hopes for environmental benefits, and a weakening of China’s relations with the US and Europe explain today’s push for recycling. In the US, the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement, which prohibits defense procurement of rare earths and other critical materials from China, Iran, North Korea, and Russia, has also spurred action; it is scheduled to take effect on 1 January 2027.

A lot is going on in the rare-earth ecosystem, says Vincent Harris, a professor of electrical and computer engineering at Northeastern University and founder and CEO of Metamagnetics Inc. “But creating a domestic supply of rare-earth magnets will take at least five years.”

Recycling permutations

Making magnets is a complex, multistage process. Production begins with mining ores, separating out pure metal elements and oxides—the toxic refining steps—and creating alloys. Pulverizing those alloys and bonding them with resin or sintering them makes magnets. (Rare-earth oxides also end up in optics, ceramics, catalysts, and more.)

Recycling involves treating feedstock—end-of-life consumer products or scraps from magnet cuttings, known as swarf. Magnetic components are sorted from shredded waste and have their coatings removed. They are then demagnetized and roasted to remove organics before the various rare earths are differentiated.

New separation technologies create far less toxic waste than traditional solvent methods. The processes involve solution chemistry, electrochemistry, and heat, but the companies keep the details under wraps. The earlier in the manufacturing process to which the feedstock is returned, the more expensive, but the input scrap can be messier, and sometimes the resulting magnet is purer.

At the start of this year, Harris began reconditioning samarium–cobalt magnets for the US Navy. SmCo tolerates high temperatures but is brittle and occupies a niche in the rare-earth market. “I clean them up, slice them for optical microscopy and x-ray diffraction,” he says.

Magnets with 95% of the magnetic strength of the original SmCo get polished and sent back to the navy, which uses them in, for example, traveling-wave tubes to amplify RF and microwave signals for radar control, satellite communication, and data links, says Harris. The rest gets pulverized and recycled into weaker magnets. He offers the reconditioning as a service to the navy, he says, adding that it “probably won’t make money.”

Geomega Resources in Quebec, Canada, has a demonstration plant and is moving into commercial magnet recycling. “We are feed agnostic,” says Kiril Mugerman, president and CEO. “I don’t care if it’s windmills, scooters, EVs, MRIs, hard drives.” The feedstock is crushed and ground and then “enters the chemical loop,” he says. “A huge advantage is that we can recover reagents, so the process has practically no effluents.”

The Texas company Momentum Technologies uses a membrane solvent extraction method spun out of work done at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in the mid 2010s. Pretreated magnet waste is fed into vessels containing fibers with nanoscale pores. The fiber surfaces separate two solvent baths, and organic extractant molecules in the pores selectively grab elements and ferry them across the membranes for collection.

“We can separate out a large number of metals, including cobalt, zinc, scandium, manganese, lithium, and copper,” says Robert Miles, cofounder and chief technology officer of Momentum Technologies. “But rare earths are our number-one product.” The company’s recent focus has been on data centers that deliver their waste and then retrieve the recycled magnetic materials.

Flash Metals USA, a Rice University spin-off, separates metals and rare earths in waste by heating samples under a chlorine atmosphere. “By converting to metal chlorides,” says technology lead Lucas Eddy, “the boiling point goes down dramatically.” For example, he says, iron boils at about 3000 °C, whereas iron chloride boils at 315 °C. By controlling the applied temperature, elements can be picked out of samples: Elements with relatively low boiling points are boiled off and captured, whereas elements with high boiling points, such as rare-earth chlorides, which boil at 1550–1812 °C, remain in the sample after nearly everything else has boiled off.

At Remloy, says Bender, “we melt magnets into new alloys and make new magnetic powders.” The melt homogenizes the end-of-life NdFeB feed and removes extraneous elements such as oxygen. “We sort magnets visually and with chemical analyses. Then we melt, measure, and fine-tune the composition. We pulverize with rapid cooling.”

Remloy and sister company HyProMag, which uses a hydrogen-based recycling process, are part of Mkango Magnetic Materials. The company plans to create a full supply chain, from mine to magnet to recycling. The mine is in Malawi.

Remloy is competitive in performance and price, according to Bender. Although the company can be profitable in its niche, he says, “we have to differentiate between the success of individual companies and a fully developed, resilient supply chain.”

In efforts to shore up the supply chain for critical metals, NSF and the German Federal Agency for Breakthrough Innovation, together with Europe’s Circular Republic, are running sister milestone-driven competitions to commercialize recycling. NSF, which will invest up to $43 million in its Tech Metal Transformation Challenge, funded eight proposals earlier this year; six will move forward with a second round of funding, from which four will be selected late next year for the final challenge stage.

Bottlenecks and solutions

Feedstock is the major bottleneck in recycling. Disassembling products like computer hard drives and MRI machines is labor intensive. Electric vehicles can be good sources because they contain large, concentrated amounts of rare earths, but it will be a few years before they reach end of life at large scales. And the magnets are unlabeled, making it challenging for recyclers to know what mix of magnet components are in their feedstock.

Recycling technology can be improved. So can feedstock paths. But labor is cheaper and environmental regulations are laxer in China and other Asian countries. From an economic perspective, the West cannot compete, says Bender. But given the ubiquity of magnets in both civilian and defense applications, he says, “we should do everything we can to make the magnet supply chain more resilient and independent, both in terms of geopolitics and logistics.”

The US and European Union plan to restrict the export of waste materials containing rare earths. That could help, says Bender, but he thinks the path to a stable supply chain—and to making recycling profitable—in the West is to create long-lasting demand for Western materials. “I would wish for laws requiring that 25% of magnet materials come from the Western world, either from recycling or mining,” he says. “That is the big lever.”