REE Recycling a Challenge, but Solutions Exist

Ensia’s Jessica Marshall yesterday published an article on the difficulties of recycling rare earth elements (REEs), commenting that one issue is that it’s becoming more and more difficult to get batteries — perhaps “the biggest single target for recycling” — out of electronics.

However, the biggest challenge, according to Yale University industrial ecologist Thomas Graedel, is collection. “It’s more of a social and perhaps regulatory challenge than a technological challenge,” Marshall quotes him as saying.

Even so, there are certainly ways to improve the amount of REE recycling that goes on. Those include:

Products could be designed to be easier to dismantle. For example, [Alex King of the Ames Lab] says, his team is trying to separate the phosphors from display glass on a phone. ‘You could ask the manufacturers to come up with a way to get the display glass off at the end of life,’ before the phone is crushed.

Another possibility is to isolate the rare earths within a device. ‘We are working with a couple of electronics manufacturers to understand how you can manufacture a board so you can pluck off certain components off of the board before you take others,’ [Eric Peterson of Idaho National Laboratory] says. One example might be to build the circuit board in layers, with different materials at different heights so they could be sequentially scraped off. Or modular rare-earth-metal-containing components could be designed to be reused as is, Peterson says.

Click here to read the full Ensia report.