Germany’s Fraunhofer IKTS and TU Bergakademie Freiberg are advancing two processing routes to recover and upgrade neodymium, iron and boron from end-of-life magnets in NEO-CYCLE, a Horizon Europe project targeting a TRL 6 demonstration. The partners reported progress as planning for a pilot plant gets under way.
The project runs from September 2024 to August 2028 and has an EU contribution of 11.47 million euros. Its initial focus is magnets recovered from discarded hard disk drives, rather than the full range of products that use permanent magnets.
One route uses solid-state chlorination: ammonium chloride is applied to magnet material and the feed is heated to convert it into metal chlorides. The second treats powdered magnet waste in an electrochemical cell, selectively separating boron and other constituents before downstream hydrometallurgical purification. Both routes are being tested as ways to recover valuable materials from magnet waste.
The technical objective is to separate and upgrade neodymium, iron and boron to purities suitable for higher-value applications, rather than stop at a rare-earth concentrate. Planned end uses include catalysts for ammonia production, pharmaceutical and chemical applications, fertilisers and polymers. The project aims to produce several saleable products from one waste stream, instead of relying only on recovered rare earths.
Permanent magnets are used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, industrial motors and electronics. Europe remains heavily dependent on imported rare-earth processing and exposed to imported magnet supply. Recovering material embedded in European products is presented as a way to create domestic feedstock without opening a new mine.
Alongside process development, NEO-CYCLE includes digital modelling, plant monitoring and digital product passports, as well as life-cycle, cost and techno-economic assessments. The partners’ central technical test is whether the routes can maintain recovery rates, purity and reagent efficiency when moved from controlled laboratory conditions to continuous pilot operation. If they perform at pilot scale, the routes could provide a model for converting complex magnet waste into multiple industrial raw-material streams and improving the economics of European rare-earth recycling.
