Materials recovery is a crucial step of circularity, and a pilot project is underway that would enable e-scrap processors to recover rare earth elements from end-of-use electronics within their facilities.
Materials Recovery & Circularity
Electronics are manufactured with rare earth elements that require significant amounts of ore, energy, and water to extract. According to the World Economic Forum, there were more mobile phone subscriptions worldwide than there are people in the world, and each one contains at least six different rare earth elements. The global electronic manufacturing services (EMS) market size was valued at USD 609.79 billion in 2024, and is projected to grow to $1,033.17 billion by 2032.
Think about the amount of electronics in the world, including consumer devices, smart appliances, EVs, medical technology, farming equipment, etc. Now think about how many resources it would take to mine the rare earth elements for all of these devices. Circularity is integral to sustainability, and materials recovery helps keep these elements in circulation to reduce the demand for new materials to be mined.
Rare Earth Recovery Project
A system was recently installed on-site at RecycleForce’s facility in Indianapolis as a result of the pilot project. The system is a bolt-on modular system designed to make it logistically and economically feasible for e-scrap processors to recover rare earth elements at their facilities. Typically, most rare earth elements are extracted by manually separating the magnet from the hard drive before processing, which can be highly labor-intensive and time-consuming. The pilot project involves shredded hard drives being put into an acid-free copper-based solution that chemically dissolves the small amount of rare earth elements, while leaving the rest of the metals and plastic intact. The resulting rare earth fraction is then ready to be sent to a refinery to produce manufacturing-ready rare earth raw materials for reuse.
A challenge for e-scrap processors is the number of devices required by clients to be destroyed. Hundreds of thousands of devices are destroyed without being able to recover rare earth elements. Most notably, the copper solution allows for rare earth recovery from the shredded device stream, which means recovery is possible from hard drives even when clients require physical destruction.
“We can actually take the shredded (materials), put them in a copper solution, and the solution will selectively dissolve the magnet that contains the rare earth,” lead researcher and scientist at Iowa’s Ames National Laboratory, Ikenna Nlebedim, said. “The aluminum will not be dissolved. The copper is not going to be dissolved. The plastics will not be dissolved. So now you have the rare earth in a solution.”
After hard drives are shredded, the aluminum is separated, then added to the ferrous fraction with the rare earth elements into a large machine akin to cement mixing, where it is mixed with the copper solution. Through a process taking about four hours, the copper solution pulls out all of the rare earth material, resulting in a green substance that can then be sent off for refining.
Executive director of recycling at RecycleForce, Daniel Rowe, explained that, “Rather than sending 4,000 pounds of hard drives, we’re only sending 40 pounds of the rare earth concentrate oxide.”
IT asset management and disposition enterprises like HOBI provide a range of IT asset management and disposition services focusing on maximizing value with materials recovery and mitigating environmental liability.