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Magnetic Rare Earth Elements Hard disk drives contain valuable materials that are used in their construction and operation. This includes rare-earth magnetics that are used in the rotary actuator that allows the heads to write and read information from tracks of data on the disk surfaces. The rare earth elements used in HDDs include Neodymium, Praseodymium and Dysprosium, used because of their unique magnetic properties.
Rare earths have a significant economic value and in light of recent embargos of the types of rare earths that are used in constructing HDDs, recovering the rare earths from end-of-life HDDs will have significant economic value. Besides their use in HDD motors, rare earth elements are used in electric vehicles, wind turbines and advanced electronics. We have written in the past about about creating a circular economy for storage devices .
As an example of this effort, Western Digital, Microsoft’s cloud data centers and a couple of materials recycling companies recently reported extracting rare earths from about 47,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life HDDs and other materials. The recycling partners are Critical Materials Recovery and PedalPoint Recycling. The hard drives were collected from several Microsoft data centers in the United States and sent to the recycling partners.
Shreds of HDDs, SSDs, and caddies were sent to PedalPoint where they were sorted and processed. The magnets and steel were then sent to CMR to figure out the best way to sort and size the materials and extract the rare earth elements using CMR’s environmentally friendly and economically competitive acid-free recycling process. The four companies went through multiple pilots to create a mass production ecosystem at scale for retrieval of rare earths, which was completed in December 2024.
Together the companies transformed close to 50,000 pounds of end-of-life drives, mounting caddies, and other materials into critical, high-value materials, all while significantly reducing environmental impact. The image below shows a schematic of the rare earth element recycling prototype. Rare Earch Recycling Methodology The figure below from the white paper on this project shows the acid-free dissolution and recovery of rare earth elements using a copper salt solution.
This method is said to be ideal for leaching from low-concentrated rare earth feedstocks, such as from shredded HDDs. This method recovers more than 90% of the REEs from the HDD feedstock to produce a more than 99.5% pure rare earth oxides.
Acid free rare earth element extraction process The WDC release says that more than 85% of rare earth elements primary production occurs outside the US and the domestic recycling rate is low. The largest hyperscalers in the world have collaborated to create an advanced eco-friendly sorting system. The non-acid based recycling process not only recapture rare earths but also gold, copper, aluminum and steel.
The current rate earth element recycling in the US is less than 10%. This system recaptured about 80% by mass of the raw recycled feedstock. With domestic recycling of rare earth, access to these materials can minimize transportation emissions and decrease the dependency on imported materials.
In addition, using this recycling method, obtaining these materials is estimated to generate about 95% less greenhouse gas emissions compared to traditional mining and processing practices. WDC, Microsoft and a couple of recycling companies have shown a high efficiency, acid-free process for extracting rare earth elements from shredded hard disk drives. Recycling valuable materials from storage devices can improve the local supply chain and avoid environmental impacts.
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