Robert Wright of the Financial Times reports that HyProMag, founded at Birmingham University, recycles electronic waste to recover rare earth minerals crucial for low-carbon energy. Their innovative process extracts valuable materials from old hard-disk drives, reducing reliance on centralized production in China and promoting a more sustainable, domestic supply. They write:
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. […]
“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.” […]
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.
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