Could discarded electronics become America’s next source of rare earths?

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster): The devices we throw away every day, like old computers, hard drives, servers, and industrial electronics, may contain some of the world’s most valuable materials. 

Hidden inside them are rare earth elements, a group of metals essential for artificial intelligence infrastructure, renewable energy systems, electric motors, advanced defense systems, and many more present and future technologies. 

Recovering these materials has remained a major challenge, allowing valuable resources to leave domestic supply chains and often end up overseas. 

Now, an Ohio-based rare earth recovery company, Paladin Envirotech, is trying to change this. By recovering rare earth elements from discarded electronics, the company hopes to keep critical materials within domestic supply chains rather than losing them to overseas markets.

“This expansion is about turning end-of-life equipment into a strategic resource that ensures all materials remain part of the domestic economy,” Bill Vasquez, Chief Operating Officer at Paladin, said in a press release.

Why is recovering rare earths so difficult

Many electronic devices contain rare earth elements, but recovering them economically and at scale has proven difficult.

One of the biggest obstacles comes long before the recycling process begins. According to the Paladin team, a major problem lies in the “last mile” of e-waste recovery—the gap between when equipment is retired and when it reaches a facility capable of extracting valuable materials.

For example, a company replacing hundreds of hard drives or servers may be located hundreds of miles from the nearest specialized recycling facility. Transporting such equipment over long distances can be expensive, causing some materials to be diverted into lower-value recycling streams or even sent to landfills.

“Across industry and government, there’s a growing focus on building resilient, onshore infrastructure—and that starts with solving for the last mile of e-waste, where too much material still leaks out of the system,” Vasquez added. 

On the other hand, domestic mining projects take years or even decades to develop. Therefore, recovering rare earths from discarded electronics is viewed as a quicker and more practical way to obtain these materials.

Building a network to capture critical materials

One of the biggest obstacles in rare-earth recycling is collecting discarded electronics before they enter low-value recycling streams or are shipped overseas. To address this problem, Paladin has expanded its collection and processing network across the United States.

The company’s newest facility in Phoenix, Arizona, adds about 93,000 square feet of processing capacity and serves Arizona, Nevada, Southern California, and New Mexico. Additional sites in three other states help create a distributed collection system capable of handling discarded electronics closer to where they are generated.

This network operates on a hub-and-satellite model, allowing electronics to be collected and processed closer to where they are retired rather than being shipped long distances to a small number of centralized facilities.

Recovering rare earths from old electronics

Collecting discarded electronics is only the first step. Recovering the rare earth elements trapped inside them requires specialized processing technologies.

Paladin’s recovery process uses patented technology developed with researchers associated with the Critical Minerals Institute at the US Department of Energy’s Ames National Laboratory and the Iowa State University Research Foundation. 

This system uses an acid-free dissolution method to recover rare earth elements, including neodymium, dysprosium, praseodymium, and terbium. These materials are key ingredients in high-performance magnets used in electric vehicles, defense technologies, high-tech computing hardware, and renewable energy solutions. 

By recovering them from discarded electronics (such as old servers, hard drives, and computers), the process aims to turn products that have reached the end of their useful lives into a new source of critical materials.

This approach is part of a growing concept known as urban mining—the recovery of valuable materials from products that have already been manufactured and used. 

As demand for rare earth elements continues to rise, urban mining could provide an additional source of supply while reducing dependence on imported materials.

However, recycling alone is unlikely to meet all future demand, and large-scale recovery systems still need to prove they can operate efficiently at a national scale. This is important because the success of efforts such as Paladin’s will depend on whether they can recover enough material to make a meaningful contribution to future supplies.

Courtesy: www.interestingengineering.com