The electronic waste piled up in a workshop at Birmingham university does not look like an obvious answer to a pressing economic and strategic problem. It sits in white sacks, each holding a tonne of material made up of shiny metal triangles cut from the corners of old hard-disk drives.
However, HyProMag, a company founded by staff at the university’s School of Metallurgy and Materials, believes the “waste” could be a valuable and lucrative source of so-called rare earth minerals crucial for the new, low-carbon energy forms that future economies are likely to demand.
Western countries are keen to loosen China’s stranglehold on access to the group of 17 minerals used to make strong and stable magnets for use in wind turbines, electric cars and other applications. HyProMag’s technology extracts the magnets containing rare earths, which make up 10-15 per cent of the weight of the hard-disk drives.
China controls about 90 per cent of world capacity for processing the minerals, and has steadily tightened restrictions on exporting the materials and technology needed to process them. It imposed new restrictions on exports to the US in late January in response to President Donald Trump’s tariffs on imports to the US from China.
President Trump, meanwhile, has made supply of rare earths from Ukraine a condition of continued US military support for the country.
“We can compete on the basis that we can access raw material sources inside embedded magnets which otherwise would not be recovered,” said Allan Walton, founding director HyProMag. “So often they end up in landfill.”
HyProMag was founded in 2018 by Walton, professor of critical and magnetic materials, and his colleagues at Birmingham university. It was bought by a unit of Canada-based Mkango Resources in 2023.
Competitors such as Cyclic Materials, a Toronto-based clean technology start-up whose backers include Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, are also hoping that the Chinese restrictions will enhance opportunities to commercialise what is still a novel recycling technique.
Other companies planning to expand rare earth recycling efforts include Belfast-based Ionic Technologies and Tokyo-listed Envipro.
Gavin Mudd, director of the government-backed UK Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre, said countries such as Britain needed to consider “all of the options” to secure access to critical minerals.
While the UK imports about 5,000-10,000 tonnes of rare earth magnets annually in finished products and components, only about 1 per cent are currently recycled, similar to other industrialised nations.
“We need to look at future domestic production where we can . . . [and also] look at recycling,” Mudd said.
Meanwhile, Ahmad Ghahreman, chief executive of Cyclic Materials, pointed out that magnets were brittle and tended to be covered in coatings and were often glued in place. “This makes recovering magnets from end-of-life products challenging,” he said.
The key to HyProMag’s technology is a cylindrical vessel installed a floor above the piles of waste. Workers load a rotating drum inside the cylinder with up to a tonne of waste then shut two airtight doors and pump the cylinder full of pure hydrogen.
The hydrogen atoms enter tiny fissures in the magnets, causing them to shatter and separate from the surrounding material. Over the course of four to eight hours, a dust made up mostly of magnet ingredients falls to the bottom of the vessel, while parts of other materials such as steel and aluminium mostly stay in the drum.
Nick Mann, HyProMag’s managing director, said the technique allowed the company to salvage magnet ingredients in “quite a clean way” without the need for expensive labour.
Cyclic Technologies’ technique used a “mechanical process” to access magnets in products, before separating out the individual elements by immersing the magnets in chemicals, Ghahreman said.
The two companies are offering customers different end products.
With most kinds of waste, HyProMag takes the crumbled magnet material — usually an alloy containing iron, boron and the rare-earth mineral neodymium — and sieves it to remove unwanted materials such as bits of nickel coating. It grinds the sieved material in a mill to produce an alloy that can be turned back into a new magnet.
HyProMag says its approach minimises the processing and energy required for recycling compared with alternatives. The company plans to recycle a range of end-of-life products, including car motors, wind-turbine generators and MRI scanner components as well as the hard-disk drive parts.
Ghahreman, meanwhile, insisted his company’s approach was superior to HyProMag’s “magnet to magnet” approach because it produced separated metals or ores, rather than mixed alloys. That allowed companies to use the rare earths for applications other than making magnets.
He compared the process to recycling a pizza.
“When you recycle pizza with our technology, you go from pizza to flour, salt, pepper, all the other ingredients that we use,” Ghahreman said. “With magnet-to-magnet technology, you go from pizza to dough.”
HyProMag and Cyclic Technologies have both successfully raised funds for capacity expansions.
Cyclic Technologies intends to increase its production capacity to 600 tonnes of rare earth oxides annually by the end of this year, from 100 tonnes in 2024. It also plans to open a US plant with a capacity of 1,200 tonnes of rare earth oxides this year and open plants in Canada and Europe by 2028.
“We’re ambitious in how much rare earths we would like to produce,” Ghahreman said, adding that the company’s methods were “cost effective”.
HyProMag intends to produce 25-30 tonnes a year after it starts larger scale production at a new, higher capacity plant set to be completed in the second quarter of the year in Tyseley, southern Birmingham.
It expects capacity at that plant and another one being planned for Pforzheim, in Germany, to reach an annual 350 tonnes of alloys for magnets, and is also planning a plant at Fort Worth, Texas, that could produce up to 1,000 tonnes of alloys a year.
Walton said the company’s recycling efforts would have wider benefits as they could free economies across the world from “very centralised” production of rare earths in China.
“This technology . . . is a way of stripping out very large quantities of rare earths and creating a domestic supply,” Walton said.
https://www.ft.com/content/dd540dc0-1ac2-43d4-90a6-59fcbbd2d946
