![]() ![]() “At the end, we’ll present some business cases for external stakeholders, but it is up to the technology owners to decide how to go further,” said Martinez. ![]() The REEPRODUCE consortium includes 15 partners, mainly from industry, representing the whole value chain, and it will be up to them how the results are commercialised. “Then all of these magnets will go to a recycling plant, which will be robust enough to accommodate different magnet chemistries and coatings,” said Martinez. The next stages will involve building robots that can extract the component containing the magnet from each item, and then extract the magnet itself from the component. The first pilot has started, testing a sorting technology that uses computer vision and artificial intelligence to identify and pick out products likely to contain rare earth magnets from mixed electrical and electronic equipment waste. “Now we want to show that we can extract those magnets from end-of-life products in an automatised way, and that the chemical process developed in REE4EU can accommodate different magnet chemistries, from different sources,” Martinez said. These issues are being addressed in a follow-up project called REEP RODUCE, which began in May 2022 with funding from Horizon Europe. “We cannot, in Europe, extract the magnets by hand from the different end-of-life products,” said Martinez. Doing this economically, and with due respect for the environment and worker safety, will require automation. The next problem is getting the magnets out of end-of-life products, most of which have not been designed to be taken apart. “In most cases, until you open up the product, you don’t have a clue,” said Martinez. The first problem is knowing which of them contain rare earth magnets. Rare earth magnets can be found in a wide range of products, from medical imaging devices and industrial robots, to consumer products such as dishwashers and microwaves. “The recyclers that we approached with our business case wanted to know: can I get 1,000 tonnes of spent magnets coming to my plant every year? And we didn’t know the answer to that,” Martinez said. While the recycling technology worked, taking it to the market presented further challenges. This alloy was then used to make new permanent magnets to be used in products. Concluding in 2019, the project successfully treated several tonnes of process wastes and end-of-life products containing rare earth elements, resulting in the recovery of almost 100 kilograms of rare earth alloys. Martinez was the project manager for REE4EU, a Horizon 2020 project that set out to demonstrate a closed-loop permanent magnet recycling process for the first time in Europe. “If we want to keep that material in Europe, the whole value chain has to talk together.” “There are already a lot of magnets in Europe that are collected by scrap dealers and sent back to China for recycling,” said Ana Maria Martinez, a senior research scientist at the independent research organisation SINTEF in Norway. Then there have to be end users who are willing to buy magnets from a European producer rather than from China. That stretches from processing the recycled material through to magnet fabrication. With the use of these magnets on the rise, particularly in green technologies such as wind turbines and electric vehicles, Europe is keen to break its dependence on imports, the bulk of which come from China.įor recycling to make an impact, it’s not just the recycling technology that requires attention, but the whole value chain for rare earth magnets. Most permanent magnets, especially those with the highest performance, contain raw materials that are scarce in Europe. The Critical Raw Materials Act, currently making its way through the EU legislative process, addresses some of the barriers, but others need to be tackled before all the pieces fall into place. Recovering critical raw materials from rare earth magnets is relatively straightforward, but a number of other issues need to be resolved before a useful recycling system can emerge in Europe. ![]()
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