Rare Earth Metals in Everyday Tech: Are They Recyclable?

Find out about the rare earth metals in everyday technology and whether they can really be recycled.

A small piece of one of the rarest and most mundane components of the planet is in every phone you carry, laptop you use, and headphones you wear. The elements that rarely appear in the news are neodymium, dysprosium, terbium, europium, cerium — and most people would be hard-pressed to pick out one without being told what it was. But without them, today's technology, which we use daily, wouldn't work the way it does. Screens would be just as bright as the ones we're used to, speakers would sound as loud, and electric vehicles would have motors as powerful as they do today in a comparable size.

The nitty-gritty of most people's understanding of rare earth metals is the surprise that they aren't actually rare in the earth. From a geological point of view, some rare earth elements are more abundant than gold or silver. The real scarcity is not the raw "stuff" in the earth's crust — it is our ability to dig it up, process it, and ultimately recycle it economically and environmentally. The truth behind rare earth metals begins there – between how much is there and how much we can actually recover or reuse – and it's a story that is growing increasingly relevant and urgent every year, as the demand for electronics, renewable energy and electric vehicles keeps increasing.

Rare earth metals: What are they really?

Rare earth elements (REEs) are the term used for a group of 17 elements of the periodic table that have similar chemical properties. It includes well-known elements such as neodymium and cerium, as well as lesser-known ones such as praseodymium, samarium, and gadolinium. They are not valuable because of their appearance or weight, but because of their special magnetic, luminescent, and electrochemical properties, which make them extremely useful wherever size, strength, and efficiency are required at the same time.

The term "rare earth" is a bit of a misnomer because the elements are not rare in mineral deposits, but rather were discovered in unusual deposits centuries ago. In fact, materials such as cerium are more abundant in the Earth's crust than copper. What is really rare is that these elements are not found in easy-to-mine, concentrated deposits. Rather, they're found in low quantities and are strongly bound to other minerals, which makes them technically challenging and costly to mine and recycle compared to other metals such as iron, aluminum, or copper.

Which of the following items have you seen in your daily tech that you don't know where they're made?

You may be surprised by how much you use rare earth elements in your home or office. The phone in your pocket contains at least a couple of rare earth metals at work that you would never catch on the outside looking in. Tiny magnets made of neodymium and dysprosium drive the vibration motor and speaker in your phone, as well as a few camera stabilization technologies. Without these small yet strong magnets, our phones would be much larger and/or unable to provide the audio and haptic feedback we now enjoy.

The same story applies to laptops and conventional hard drives. Every spinning hard drive has a tiny but very strong neodymium magnet that moves the read/write head to the precise position on the hard drive. Rare earth magnets are also commonly used in cooling fans to efficiently circulate cool air and keep laptops thin. Europium and terbium are also used as phosphors to create the reds and greens that give LED and LCD screens vivid, accurate colors and make them look sharp and true to life.

However, one of the most important uses today is electric vehicles. The powerful yet small motors that enable electric vehicles to move smoothly and efficiently rely on a pound or more of neodymium-iron-boron magnet material. Rare earth elements are also an off-the-spectrum but vital component in the wind turbine's generator, which relies heavily on magnet technology. Even headphones and portable speakers rely on rare earth magnets to produce full and rich sound with the smallest components possible.

The interesting thing is, in nearly all of these uses, the amount of rare earth material employed is quite small — typically grams, and sometimes even milligrams per device. This is why they are such a challenging and interesting recycling project – there is indeed a material to be recovered. Still, it is difficult to recover efficiently without changing our recycling paradigms.

So, can Rare Earth Metals be Recycled?

Yes, in theory, but in practice, it's much more complicated than recycling, say, an aluminum can or a copper pipe. The ability to make rare earth recycling a common practice, economically viable and environmentally friendly, faces several challenges that must be addressed if it is to be solved. Understanding these challenges helps explain why, despite years of awareness, the issue remains unresolved.

The first big hurdle is that rare earth metals are virtually never used in isolation. Rather, they are incorporated into alloys, into the interior of magnets, or as a thin layer attached to other parts. Because of this tight integration, crushing or shredding is not very effective at separating rare earth materials from a device (at least compared with other materials like steel or aluminum). Separating these elements from other materials in the environment requires specialized processes, which can be difficult and expensive.

The second challenge, as mentioned earlier, is the scale needed for recovery to be worthwhile. For example, a single smartphone may contain less than a gram of rare earth material, so to extract it profitably, tens of thousands or thousands of devices may need to be processed to obtain a useful amount of recovered rare earth material. This is why few facilities around the world specialize in rare earth recovery, as many lack sufficient technology or material volume to make it economically viable.

Chemical recovery adds a third level of complexity. Compared with copper or aluminum, which are sometimes melted down and reused in a fairly simple manner, extracting rare earth elements into a usable form is often very complex, requiring sophisticated chemical leaching or high-temperature separation processes. These processes require special equipment, skilled workers, and handling of chemical byproducts, which makes them more expensive than traditional metal recycling.

Last but not least is the infrastructure, or the lack of it. The industry estimates that only about one per cent of rare earth metals are recycled globally. Most e-waste with these valuable components is not recycled. It ends up in landfill, where the materials are lost, or it is exported to areas where processing standards and environmental regulations are not uniform. Developing the specialized, large-scale facilities needed to change this will require major capital investment, supportive policies, and ongoing advances in recycling technology.

The significance of recycling rare earth elements.The importance of REE recycling.

The first step in understanding the need for more attention to rare earth recycling is to understand what is currently happening in the supply chain. Because a few countries control global rare earth mining and processing, their economies and industries are vulnerable if they depend on these substances for consumer electronics, defense technology, renewable energy infrastructure, and beyond. When so much of the world's supply goes through so few sources, disruptions such as political, economic, or logistical events can cause repercussions across entire industries, almost instantaneously.

This is also a significant environmental issue. To extract rare earth elements from the ground requires a substantial amount of resources and may produce toxic and, in some instances, mildly radioactive waste as part of the natural process of separating rare earth elements from the ore they're found in. By contrast, recycling provides an alternative way to recover the same materials without further mining, minimizing environmental impact and geopolitical reliance on new mining.

Meanwhile, demand for rare earth elements is not on the wane any time soon. The use of rare earth materials in consumer electronics, electric vehicles, and growing wind energy is rising and, in many cases, cannot be replaced with more readily available materials. As demand increases, so does pressure on the existing supply chain, making recycling even more essential from economic and environmental perspectives.

This is where urban mining becomes especially interesting. Urban mining reuses discarded electronic devices and industrial waste to access valuable materials, rather than excavating new mines. The amount of certain metals in e-waste can sometimes be greater than that found in conventional ore deposits, offering a potentially more substantial and readily available source of these valuable materials than we've realized in our landfills and storage drawers of old devices.

Rare Earth Recycling: The process in a nutshell.

The initial phase of rare earth metal recycling is collection, in which used computers, phones, laptops, and hard drives are collected through e-waste programs or in collaboration with rare earth metal recyclers, such as Divine Metal Recycling. The next step is disassembly, in which electronics are separated, and parts are analyzed to determine which rare earth elements are likely to be concentrated in useful amounts; this includes devices likely to contain magnets and some circuit board components.

Magnets containing neodymium and related elements are isolated very carefully, and often demagnetized before further processing because safely handling powerful magnets requires special techniques to avoid injury or equipment damage. The recovered magnets are then subjected to a chemical processing stage to extract and purify the rare earth element content from the surrounding material by either a hydrometallurgical or pyrometallurgical process. For some facilities, parts of this process may require acid leaching, solvent extraction, or high-temperature smelting, which are challenging because many of the elements are chemically similar.

Lastly, the purified materials are fed back into the supply chain, generally as rare earth oxides or alloys that the manufacturer can use to make new products. This rounds it off, as it would otherwise be discarded Electronic Waste and becomes a real source of raw material for the next technology.

What You Can Do

Even small decisions can significantly affect whether these materials are recycled or permanently lost in landfill, although most people will not be mining them themselves. That one thing they've all got to do is never put electronics in regular household trash, because that means that whatever is inside is lost for good. Rather, bringing used technology to certified e-waste or metal recycling facilities puts used devices into a system that has a minimum of a recovery option – often very out of view.

It's also important to be selective about where you take your electronics. Those who deal specifically in electronics, rather than just scrap metal, are far more likely to know how to identify and route components containing rare earth materials. Supporting right-to-repair and manufacturer take-back programs can also help prolong device lifespan before they enter the waste stream, giving their technology more time to do something useful before it is recycled.

Here at Divine Metal Recycling, our job is to do our part to ensure that recovered electronics and components with recoverable metals like rare earth elements are not mixed into the general waste stream, but are directed to the appropriate specialty processing stream. Technical extraction of rare earths is often carried out in specialized facilities not found in regular scrap collection, but it is important to collect and sort the correct material to enable the full recovery chain.

The Bottom Line

Theoretically, rare earth metals can be recycled; however, the technologies, infrastructure, and economics have not yet matured to meet the current demand. The need for rare earths year after year for electric vehicles and renewable energy systems, and even more so for ever more complicated consumer electronics, is making the recycling efforts of these materials less a nice thing to do and more of a sensible business proposition. Each device recycled responsibly is a small piece of a future where the materials that power our technologies are not only dug from the earth but recovered.

Frequently Asked Questions

The most common rare earth metals in electronics are: Some of the most prevalent rare earth elements in everyday electronics, such as smartphones, laptops, and speakers, include Neodymium (primarily in magnets), Dysprosium (primarily in display technology), and Europium and Terbium (also used in display technology).