Ed Ballard

The basic idea is it's faster than a mine.

So to permit and develop a mine after you've determined that there are like enough rare earths in a certain place to make it worth building a mine, that can take like a decade or more.

And so that is really not a fast way if you're trying to rapidly build up your own secure supply chain of rare earths.

And so the idea behind the recycling is that you have all of this existing material

equipment out there in the world that is coming to the end of its life, and that is only going to increase, that can be harvested.

We already recycle all sorts of other metals, like most of the aluminum in your drinks cans gets recycled.

We're good at recycling steel.

Most of the US steel is already recycled, but it's never been economically viable

to recycle the rare earths and that's because for a start the actual volumes are pretty small and also because you're talking about often little bits of equipment where the rails are bound up with other materials bits of plastic other metals and it's just been too fiddly to get these materials out it just hasn't been economically viable

But now with this emphasis on building up a domestic supply chain, that's sort of increasing the interest in this potential path to improving the supply.

The main startup in the story that we've written is a company called Cyclic.

And what they are saying is that they have come up with a cheaper way of doing this.

So to take a step back, so what currently happens is when you throw something away, it goes to a recycler and some of the metals are already harvested.

But the rare earths themselves probably end up in this waste material called slag.

And the idea is that now cyclic will come along and say, no, don't forget about those bits.

We will buy those.

We will pay more for this equipment.

And then using kind of conventional mechanical recycling approaches to remove the rare earth magnets themselves from the surrounding gadgets.

And then after that, use basically chemistry, bathing the metal in a kind of bath of chemicals to dissolve the rare earths that you can then refine again.

To take one example of how this actually works in practice, one of the big sources of old electronics that they're using is old hard drives from data centers, which contain little tiny magnets in the corner of each one.