Rare earth metal recycling

REs consist of the fourteen lanthanide group metals, Scandium, and Yttrium and are critical for advanced technologies, green technologies, and defense technologies. Nearly 200 minerals contain >;0.01% RE metals but only a dozen have high enough quantities to be economically extractable. In this article, we will review the need for rare earth recycling, options available to recycle rare earth metals, and the possibilities and difficulties of recycling rare earths on an industrial scale. Even though processes are available to extract RE metals from waste products, most of them are still at laboratory scale and very few examples exist where they have been applied in industrial size recycling settings. Because rare earths are used in small amounts, a key challenge is the lack of information about the amount of rare earth metals in products. Nevertheless, preliminary findings show that specialized rare earth recycling lines may be technically feasible, but not economically profitable unless a broader systems perspective is taken.