Recycling rare earth magnets is an ongoing conversation in the permanent magnet industry. Over the years, the Apex Magnets team has compiled information about rare earth metal recycling to share with our community, including the future of urban mining. We’ve also shared information about various hard drive recycling projects and studies, such as Critical Materials Institute’s hard drive recycling process and Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s research on making rare earth magnet recovery more economically feasible. Now, Google is working toward finding ways to recycle hard drives from its data centers worldwide.

Google’s Sustainability Initiatives 

In 2019, Google’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Kate Brandt, published the company’s latest sustainability initiatives, “A circular Google in a sustainable world.” The company’s strategy outlines how they can “maximize the reuse of finite resources across our operations, products and supply chains and enable others to do the same.” Part of this strategy includes changing the “flow of resources through Google consumer electronics and supply chain.”  The goal we’re most excited about is the development of a model for new hard drives using rare earth magnets recovered from hard drives in 2019. 

The Search for a Hard Drive Recycling Process for Data Centers

Researchers from a Google data center in Mayes County, Oklahoma, extracted magnet assemblies from old hard disk drives in 2019. These assemblies consist of two rare earth magnets and are responsible for controlling an actuator arm that allows the device to read and write data. In that time, they extracted 6,100 magnet assemblies by hand that were then placed into new drives and used in data centers, which are the world’s largest consumers of hard disk drives. The results of this study, published in Volume 173 of Resources, Conservation and Recycling, show that rare earth magnets can be recovered from hard drives and repurposed. There’s also an environmental benefit to recycling these magnets — reused magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones. Traditionally, when old drives are replaced at data centers in the US every three to five years, they are collected and disposed of through a specific protocol for security reasons. 

Why Should We Recycle Hard Drives?

The majority of rare earth metal production is outside of the United States. Due to limitations and regulations on exporting rare earth elements, our country experiences rare earth metal supply shortages. Studies that focus on learning how to efficiently and affordably recycle rare earth magnets help mitigate those challenges. Rare earth mining also has a negative environmental impact, so recycling and repurposing magnets decrease the need to mine for rare earth elements.   

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