Science Friday - How To Recycle Rare Earth Elements

Episode Date: May 22, 2024

Rare earth elements are a group of 17 metals used in a wide range of things that make modern life possible, including batteries, magnets, LED light bulbs, phone screens, and catalytic converters.These elements are essential to a green economy because they are integral to many technologies designed to have low environmental impact. However, mining these metals is a dirty, complex, and costly process. And as the world transitions towards more clean energy production, the demand for them will continue to grow.One possible solution is to recycle rare earth elements when they’re discarded in electronics waste. On stage in Ames, Iowa, Ira Flatow talks with Dr. Ikenna Nlebedim and Dr. Denis Prodius, two materials scientists from the Critical Materials Institute at the Ames National Laboratory who have developed a new acid-free method to recycle rare earth metals found in magnets.Transcript for this segment will be available the week after the show airs on sciencefriday.com. Subscribe to this podcast. Plus, to stay updated on all things science, sign up for Science Friday's newsletters.

A new way to recycle rare earth elements without using acid seems a bit like magic. It's the magic. It is science. It's Wednesday, May 22nd, and you're listening to Science Friday. I'm sci-fi producer Shoshana Bucksbaum. You've probably heard quite a bit about the importance of rare earth elements. This group of 17 metals are used in a wide range of things that make our modern lives possible, like batteries, magnets, LED light bulbs, phone screens, and catalytic converters, just to name a few. These elements are essential to a green economy, but mining them is a dirty, complex, and costly process. And as we continue our energy transition, the demand for these elements grows.

One of the possible solutions is to recycle them from discarded waste. But how? Here's Ira Flato in front of a live audience at Iowa State University in Ames, Iowa. My next guest has developed a new way to do just that. Ekena Lebedim is a material scientist at the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory. Welcome to Science Friday. Thank you for having me. And over here on my right, he'll be doing the demonstration as Dr. Dennis Proteus, also a scientist at the Critical Materials Institute at Ames.

Thank you for joining us today. Okay, E. Kenan, let's just jump right into this. How do you recycle stuff like I'm talking about it? What's the technique that you use? Well, I think that before we talk about the technique, it's important to think about where these materials are used in terms of application. I am sure that each of us here has a cell phone, definitely. And they're using electronic devices, one of which is a hard drive, something like this. That's a big hard drive.

It's a big hard drive. At the end of life, typically this is shredded. Shredded. You put this giant hard drive on a shredder. And you shred it. So that everything is just turned into garbage. It becomes a mixture of chemistry. But the reason it is shredded is because of data security.

Data security. Yeah, you don't want anybody reading your hard drive. Exactly. But if it is shredded, now how do you go about getting something that is about one, percent, maybe two percent of the entire mass in a way that is effective and as well as economically deployable. And that's where the complexity begins. You mean after it shredded? Wow. How do you do? Okay. I'm listening. How do you do that? Keep listening. So the way it was done was to take the shredded staff and you do what they call magnetic separation because the permanent

magnets are magnetic. So you separate them and then you take the magnetic stuff, you heat them up to say about 350 degrees Celsius to destroy the magnetism and then you

put them in acid and you dissolve them and then begin the precipitation and so on. The problem is you've already put many steps before you start getting what you need. And you're trying to pull the magnetic stuff out. The magnets are trying to put the magnet, the rareth in the magnet. I see. That's what

you are going after. Okay. So you have come up with a better way. Tell us about that. The way we've done this is that we take the shredded stuff, which is over there. Bottle of shredded magnet. That's a, that's a, well shredded stuff. Yeah. And then you take this and you put them in solution as they are without pre-separation. And the solution selectively dissolves the magnet. It leaves the aluminum undisolved. Copper, gold, platinum. And those can head to other recycling steps.

Now, when you have this rare in solution, you can precipitate it. Think about it this way. It's like your cloth. You put in a washing machine. We need the water, the dirty water. that's where the rare earth is. You can always wear your cloth, but we precipitate the rarette afterwards.

Do you find a magical, so to speak, way of doing this that no one else had found? What kinds of magic are you using here? It's the magic. It is science. So, Dennis. Dennis, you want to show us what happened? That was the perfect answer you gave.

So Dennis, tell us what's going on here. Okay, so we have copper sulfate solutions. Actually, you can buy it in even Amazon, and we have shreds. Sorry, maybe it's a secret information, but you can buy it in Amazon, yes. So we have shreds and we have copper sulfate. So I will just add copper sulfate here in shreds, and we'll enjoy our show, and Mother Nature will do all the job. Go for you.

So you're going to pour it in into this bottle of shredded hard drive. And it's going to extract those materials. that we want from it. So how long is that going to take to do its thing? Usually it takes in big scale, large scale, industrial scale, like three hours, four hours. But here we will see probably in 20 minutes already effect. In the next five minutes you will see how the reaction starts, and after 20 minutes you will see evident difference

with what we had at the beginning and at the end. And after that, I will demonstrate how we recover it here, and I think it will be the largest event of recycling made together. Wow, wow. And how different is this? You mentioned that it cuts out a lot of steps in the process. It goes right to the end product here? So what you see in the big jar right there is the recovered material.

So we eventually put the rarids out. So that's the one that Dennis is holding now. And we put the rarets out. and these rare rates are ready to go back into the supply chain. You can see that there is a company that is a few minutes from here, Td-D-D-Vib LLC, and they have another company called CMR. So they have already completed a pilot plant where they have started deploying the technology. Why aren't the magnet so important?

Very important question. Remember I talked about that at storage. Right. You think about electricity. vehicles. There are two key aspects of electric vehicles, maybe three. You have the battery, then you have the electronics part of it, but you also have the model. If you want the model to be very efficient, you need the permanent magnets there. And they are important. They're using different applications, including national security. In fact, that drone would not be able to

fly very well efficiently without a permanent magnet. Speaking of permanent magnets, we can Take your questions if you want to make your ways to the microphone and have questions about this. Yes, go ahead. When you recover rare earth elements from these electronic slurries, do you recover just one element or multiple elements that they then need to purify? So when we recover these elements, there are a few of the rare earth elements used in the magnet. So this would typically contain neodymium, presiodemium, and dysprosium. and so when you recover them, it's a choice you need to make.

These materials are already used to make magnets. Do you have to separate them to make magnets again? You don't have to. But if you want to separate them, then you need to take them to the next step. And the next step, once you've taken out the material you want, how do you separate the other valuable metals? Do you send that to someone else? You can send, say, the aluminum and the gold to the smelters.

But now we have a funding from the U.S. Department of Energy. And what they have asked us to do is to develop a system such that the waste doesn't come to the recycling, but the recycling goes to the waste. So which means we have modular systems, which would be at a point where the waste is generated, such that those other components, they don't need to come to us. Very clever to do that. Yes, over here. Question. What is the efficiency of your yield for this new method compared to existing methods,

and how can that eventually affect new mining of materials versus creating possibly like a self-moving recycling structure for these rare earth materials? He's either an economics major or an engineering major. Yes, how efficient is this? What's the economics of this? So, when we began developing this technology, we reached efficiency of 70%. 7.70? 70. And we celebrated it. We were so happy. Because at the time, no other recycling technology was up to 50. But when it was commercial, when we started commercial deployment of it, it got to 90%. I don't know if anything, it's 90% of anything. Well, I'm going to tell you one more.

So, 90% does when it is in electronic waste. Right. But if you have like magnet swaths, like grinding swaths and scrap magnets or pre-concentrated magnet, it is more than 98%. 98%? Correct. And is this being commercialized as we speak? Yes. The pilot plan is completed and they are going forward with further development.

Wow. I'm not going to ask how to buy stock in that company. Yes, let's go ahead. Hi there. First off, as a chemistry major, I can say, wow, I'm impressed by those percent yields. That is insane. Congratulations. But my question is, how do you make this economic compared to extracting virgin materials? Because the reality of it is, the companies that produce these electronics, if it's not economic for them to use recycled materials, they won't. How do you make sure this is something that can be scaled up to a point where it becomes economically viable? So let me begin with the last part of it. In terms of scaling, we've scaled significantly. I think one of the last processes we did was about a ton per batch. A ton per batch of electronic waste.

So if we are able to do four batches a day, then that's about four tons a day. So scalability, I think that's easier. How do we compete with mining? I don't think the goal here is to compete with mining. I think is to augment in terms of resource sustainability. So from that perspective, when we recover these materials, we need to think about the ways to make them economically feasible. And part of that is what we call co-production.

Which means, when I am recovering the rare earth, I shouldn't think that that's where the profit should come only. We should be able to recover value from other components of the electronic waste. So that's one of the ways to help with sustainability. If you get to scale and it gets to be a larger scale, how would you collect all these hard drives? How would you get them? How would that stream reach you?

Hard drive is one of the things that are easiest to collect. Easy. Except the ones that you might have in your closet. You haven't seen my closet. So most of the hard drives are used in data centers. So when you save something in the cloud, it's actually not in the cloud. It's in a hard drive somewhere. Big hard drive.

And so they're concentrated. And so when they reach end of life, they are easily collected from that same place. So those are easier than cell phones and so on. And it'll get getting to be more, more data centers. All right there. Yes, over here. I understand the process of wanting to save the rare earth particles in there. But what about the, is there any hazardous materials that come out of your process

that you have to deal with, Athwares, because of my career, I found that's the most difficult part at the end is what you end up making from the process. Thank you. So I think the easiest way to answer that question is to tell you the name of our technology, acid-free dissolution. We use no acid in dissolving these rarits. No acid. No acid is going to leach into the soil or into the rivers.

So when we dissolve rarids, we do it acid-free. And that's what sets us apart from any other group in the world. And that's why no other group can do it selectively. So because we do it acid-free, it also means that we eliminate the hazards that are associated with this process, as well as we can make sure that our waste is also not environmentally pollutant. So the process is designed with that in mind. Let me go to this. We have a few more questions.

Yes. How is this going to affect the future? Simple question. And a very important one. And let me add to that. How much will it reduce your need to mine more of those elements? Okay, I would say that recycling is one of the solutions. It is not going to eliminate mining.

Mining has its own consequences. You said that earlier. So it depends on when these materials reach end of their life. So if you take hard drives for an example, it is possible that by 2040, we should be getting near about maybe 20 million tons of rare. from recycled product, but that depends on our efficiency. It depends on if we can collect everything. So multiple factors there.

So it will help our future, especially if we don't take electronic waste that contain things that might not be helpful for our health and put them back into the landfill. All right, Dennis, let's go checking out how our recycling is going here. Yeah, so everyone remembering from what we started, yeah, so concentration of magnet is really small. but you can see some red surface, so it's where the magnet actually start to react.

And, yeah, it takes some time because it's really diluted. So we did yesterday at 11 morning, just to avoid a situation when it's not working, and you can see how it looks today. You see some stuff. So what I will do, I would like to recover RIS right now, live. You're going to recover? Recovery RIS with you.

Right now. Right now. Okay. Eyes over there. Okay. So we will take a little bit of this solution. So most dangerous stage of this show. Everybody got their goggles on?

Okay. And we have some magic oxalate containing solutions. One, two, and I'll just add them. Are you ready? Okay. One more. A little bit. So now you see how in the bottom form some product which containing rare earths.

And we'll put it together here. Here's a solution which we really consider like a wastewater, but here are earth. Oh, look at the bottom. It's done. Dennis, thank you very much for being part of us. Dennis Proteus, scientist at the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory. Laboratory. And Aquina Libidim, thank you for taking time to be with us today. Also, material scientists at the Critical Materials Institute at Ames National Laboratory. That's all the time we have

for today. Lots of folks help make the show happen, including Emma Gomez, Sandy Roberts, Robin Kasmar. Tomorrow, the science of cold, hearty grapes, how wine scientists are working to make tastier Midwestern wine. I'm Shoshana Bucksbaum. Catch you next time. Thank you.