Partnership to capture rare earth elements from disk drives
Western Digital, Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling collaborate in a multi-party rare earth element recovery and circular recycling programme using environmentally friendly chemistry to help build up critical rare earth element reserves and enhance supply chains.
Currently, over 85% of the primary production of rare earth elements occurs outside the U.S., while the domestic recycling rate is under 10%.
Essential to cloud data centre infrastructure, hard disk drives (HDDs) are complex devices that blend material science, mechanical engineering, and physics. They utilise a variety of rare earth elements (REEs) such as Neodymium (Nd), Praseodymium (Pr), and Dysprosium (Dy), which are valued for their magnetic properties, to enable HDDs to accurately read and write data. However, traditional recycling methods recover only a small portion of these precious materials, frequently overlooking rare earth elements altogether, resulting in unnecessary waste.
Together, the partners transformed around 50,000 pounds (22,680 kg) of shredded end-of-life HDDs), mounting caddies and other materials into critical high-value materials. This pioneering process of creating a new advanced sorting ecosystem with an eco-friendly non-acid process not only recaptures essential rare earth elements but also extracts metals like gold (Au), copper (Cu), aluminium (Al) and steel, feeding them back into the U.S. supply chain.
The materials for the project were collected from several Microsoft data centres in the United States. This multi-party pilot showcases a highly efficient, economically viable system with a high-yield recovery of elemental and rare earth materials of approximately 90%. Advanced chemical processes, combined with meticulous segregation of components, also allowed the system to recapture around 80% by mass of the feedstock, converting potential waste into valuable assets.
Further, based on the Life Cycle Analysis methodology, there is an estimated 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions compared to traditional mining and processing practices. By performing the entire Rare Earth Oxide (REO) production process domestically, the program minimises transportation emissions and boosts the resilience of the U.S. supply chain, decreasing dependency on imported materials.
“This initiative sets a new standard for end-of-life data storage management,” said Jackie Jung, vice president of Global Operations Strategy and Corporate Sustainability at Western Digital. “In today’s rapidly evolving data landscape, innovation must extend beyond a device’s lifecycle. Western Digital and its partners are leading the way, transforming retired storage devices into critical resources that power our future—while protecting the planet and strengthening the economy. This project is a blueprint for large-scale, domestic recycling of essential metals and materials that will drive sustainable progress for years to come.”
“This pilot program has shown that a sustainable and economically viable end-of-life (EOL) management for HDDs is achievable,” said Chuck Graham, Corporate Vice President of Cloud Sourcing, Supply Chain, Sustainability, and Security at Microsoft. “HDDs are vital to our data centre infrastructure, and advancing a circular supply chain is a core focus for Microsoft.”
This project’s environmentally friendly, acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technology was invented and initially developed at the Critical Materials Innovation (CMI) Hub. “Scaling the ADR technology from lab to demonstration scale in just eight years is a testament to the incredible work of the team at CMR. This project is significant because HDD feedstock will continue to grow globally as AI continues to drive the demand for HDD data storage,” said Tom Lograsso, Director of CMI.
If you enjoyed this article, you will like the following ones: don't miss them by subscribing to :
