The district of Bayan Obo in Inner Mongolia, China, is one of the most important areas in the world when it comes to modern technology. Home to a collection of quarries surrounded by light brown grasslands and black rocks, the district holds the largest deposits of rare earth metals found on Earth so far. 

Rare earth metals are metals like yttrium, dysprosium and neodymium, all of which are necessary for modern technology. In 2021, China was responsible for around 60% of rare earth metal production, with a recent report by the International Energy Agency predicting that number will rise to 77% by 2030. 

Neodymium magnets, in particular, are a vital part of many technologies necessary for the energy transition, such as wind turbines and electric vehicles. China having a stranglehold over the raw materials gives them a lot of market power: In 2010, when China decided to clamp down on exports of neodymium, prices spiked in the following year from $42 to $283 per kilogram.

Although Europe has some mines for rare earth metals, they aren’t as bountiful.

“I wld say there are no mines because compared to what's in China or in the other interesting areas of the world, we have nothing,” said Laura Mascheretti, a Strategic Development and Innovation Strategist at Erion. 

Erion is a company based in Italy working on the management of different kinds of waste and is seeking to improve recycling of rare earth metals like neodymium from used and discarded neodymium magnets. 

The company is part of the EU-funded HARMONY project which hopes to reduce Europe’s reliance on China for critical materials and to protect the bloc from price fluctuations.  By properly recycling devices containing these critical metals, Europe could become more independent in the future.

“The main supplier is one country and so it's up to them to decide the price of exports,” said Mascheretti.

Neodymium magnets are not currently recovered. Instead, the standard procedure is to shred them and collect other metals like iron, copper and aluminium. As these are metals that have been recycled for a long time, the processes for doing so are efficient and generate high yields, and there are already established secondary markets.

Trying to get neodymium recycling to the same level is a difficult task and one of the key issues to address.

The first step for Mascheretti and her colleagues has been to map out what products contain which metals. Alongside literature reviews, that has involved going to waste treatment plants to collect samples and conducting interviews with producers. Then any products of interest, those containing neodymium for example, are separated in the treatment plants.

“When we go to these treatment plants we go through the mountains of waste and try to find what can be useful for the project,” said Mascheretti.

There are two types of recycling that the HARMONY project is exploring. Direct recycling would be gathering magnets as they are, shredding them and getting a powder from which you can make new magnets. The other is indirect recycling, where, after the shredding process, chemical methods are used to extract the rare earth metals of interest.

The process of shredding and extracting the rare earth metals is done at Technical University Freiburg, Germany.

Direct recycling, however, isn’t necessarily as easy as it sounds. Magnets are contained within a larger device, like a motor for example, which would have to be dismantled. 

Researchers at the Polytechnic University of Milan, Italy, who are one of the project partners of HARMONY, are trying to develop a process where dismantling isn’t necessary.

The downside there is that the concentration of the rare earth metals will be low, making it a low yield process. If you shred a whole motor, only a small part of the debris will be the magnet, whereas if you shred a magnet, it makes up most if not all of the debris. One compromise is to partially dismantle a device before shredding.

“What we are doing with the Polytechnic University of Milan is trying to understand whether there's a sweet spot with dismantling,” said Mascheretti.

There has been some political movement in the EU to support the recycling of rare earth metals and other critical materials. 

Earlier this year, the Critical Raw Materials Act was approved by the European Commission, which mandates that by 2030, 25% of the bloc’s consumption of strategic materials should come from recycling. Part of the Act involves streamlining projects, like HARMONY, that focus on critical raw materials.

Although demand for neodymium magnets is expected to increase over the next decade, production is expected to grow at a lower rate, highlighting the necessity of recycling. But developing new processes for recycling is only one part of the problem.

“We can do all the processes and all the dismantling lines and whatever, but we don't have people properly recycling devices right now,” said Mascheretti. “People generally don’t dispose of their electronic waste – they just keep it in their closets.”

In order to have proper recycling of electronic waste, people need to become engaged with the topic, she says. She adds that there is “intrinsic value” in getting people to recycle as it will help foster a community spirit to make Europe more independent. 

Mascheretti says that means changing how we think about waste: “It's really fundamental right now to look at electronic waste as a new beginning, a new mine, a new place to find value-added materials”