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In 2019 these agents published the report identify a number of potential strategies, including removing and reusing entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing magnet sets, grinding old hard disk magnets, and manufacturing new dust and extracting rare earth elements from extracted units. Each of these strategies has its own challenges: manually removing sets of magnets requires a lot of work; extracting rare earths from ordinary technologies can be a major chemical or energy product and can generate significant waste, and in order to increase any of them, the purchase of a wide range of actors in the global supply chain is required.
Rare earth magnets are also “difficult to make the small supply chain adaptations needed to place used or recycled magnets inside new discs,” Jin said. “And especially when you have to start with a small number with new technology.”
Still, some companies are starting to take their first steps. In 2018, Google, a manufacturer of Seagate hard drives and innovative electronics Recontext (formerly Teleplan), carried out a small demonstration project that was to remove sets of magnets from six hard drives and place them in new Seagate drives. Frost says this show was the “catalyst” for the larger 2019 study, in which 6,100 magnets were assembled in a Google data center on a Seagate hard drive before being introduced into new hard drives at Seagate manufacturing facilities. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes this is the biggest show of its kind ever.
The results, which will be published in the next edition of the magazine Resources, conservation and recycling, not only did it show that rare earth magnets could be collected and reused on a larger scale, but it also showed that doing so had great environmental benefits. Overall, the sets of reused magnets were 86% lower than the new carbon footprint, according to the study. Frost says this estimate conservatively considered the energy mix of the local power grid that operated the data center. Google is considering the use of renewable energy in about 24 hours this special data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even smaller.
Google doesn’t say whether it has a follow-up project on the works, but has directed it to Grist publicly announced purpose developing a scalable process for recycling rare earth magnets. Ines Sousa, Google’s environmental impact program provider and author of the new research, said some challenges need to be overcome before this can be a reality.
These include extreme cleanliness in magnet recycling, as “modern hard disks are very sensitive to small particles,” and as hard disks are constantly changing, new magnet designs are emerging within a few years.
“There are opportunities for magnet design to become constant across generations to scale the reuse process,” Sousa said.
Seagate spokesman Greg Belloni told Grist that the company is “committed to working to address the complexity of rare earth recycling” in “close partnership with customers.” One of its other customers, computer maker Dell, is looking at a different approach to recycling.
In 2019, Dell launched it pilot program Use Seagate and Recontext to collect magnets from computer hard drives (collected through a Dell take-back program), shred them, extract rare earths, and use them to make new magnets. So far, some 19,000 pounds They have come together to recycle rare earth magnets through this collaboration. The project “remains a pilot program as we continue to look for ways to scale within our operations,” Dell spokeswoman Mel Derome told Grist.
Although years of rare earth magnets have been massively recycled using any approach, the Biden administration can help accelerate those efforts. Through the Ames Institute for Critical Materials at the National Laboratory, the federal government is already funding it various projects it is aimed at developing cleaner and more efficient processes for recycling rare earth elements from magnets. Lately a report to strengthen supply chain resilience, administration officials wrote that data centers managed by 4,000 U.S. governments are a “short-term opportunity” to collect rare earth magnets using this type of federally funded research and development.
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