Ed Ballard

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.

And the cyclic deals with the recycling companies to take those hard drives, slice off the corners which contain the magnets, and then process those to remove the earths so that they can be refined once again into new metal.

There are various different approaches out there, but the key is who can do this in a cost-effective way.

I would say that probably it's not going to be enough on its own to meet all of, say, US demand.

Because if you think about it mathematically, you can only recycle what's already out there, right?

So a lot of, like, we think of all the old phones you might have sitting in a drawer at home.

Each of those has got a tiny little magnet in them.

And so lots of this stuff is never going to be recycled.

It's just going to sort of languish.

So the amount you can recycle is always going to be less than...

what's already there.