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Title: WD Launches HDD Recycling Process That Reclaims Rare Earth Elements,
Cuts Out China

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/04/21/...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Tom's Hardware: While most people
enjoy PCs that are powered by SSDs, mechanical hard drives are still king in
the datacenter. When these drives reach the end of their useful lives, they
are usually shredded, and the key materials they're made of -- including
several rare earth elements (REE) -- end up as e-waste. At the same time,
countries are mining these same materials and emitting a lot of greenhouse
gases in the process. And China, a major source of REE, recently announced
export restrictions on seven of them, potentially limiting the U.S. tech
industry's access to materials such as dysprosium, which is necessary for
magnetic storage, motors, and generators. [On Thursday], Western Digital
announced that it has created a large-scale hard disk drive recycling program
in concert with Microsoft and recycling-industry partners CMR (Critical
Materials Recycling) and PedalPoint Recycling. The new process reclaims Rare
Earth Oxides (REO) containing dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium from
hard drives, along with aluminum, steel, gold, palladium, and copper. The REO
reclamation takes place completely within the U.S. and those materials go
back into the U.S. market. Dubbed the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth
Material Capture Program, WD's initiative has already saved 47,000 pounds
worth of hard drives, SSDs, and caddies from landfills or less-effective
recycling programs. WD was able to achieve a more than 90% reclaim rate for
REE and an 80% rate for all of the shredded material. The drives came from
Microsoft's U.S. data centers where they were first shredded and then sent to
PedalPoint for sorting and processing. Magnets and steel were then sent to
CMR, which uses its acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology to
extract the rare earth elements.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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