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The treasure trove hidden in discarded computers:
Four years ago at the University of Birmingham, Prof Walton and his mentor, Prof Rex Harris, discovered that running hydrogen gas through old hard-disk drives turns the magnets into powder which can be harvested, re-packed and coated, to become new magnets.
Not only will the project offer a greener solution to the rare earths market, the global demand for these minerals means there is a business case to be built.
"We are missing a trick. There is no trouble finding rare earths, it's the processing them into a useful material, like a magnet," says Prof Walton.
This year, Hypromag expects to announce a deal with the UK car company Bentley.
It has received a £2.6m grant from Innovate UK and a half a million pounds of investment and further partnership from an African junior mine, Mkango.
However, the Hypromag solution will only meet a fraction of the growing demand for rare earths, which analysts estimate will double by 2025.
Prof Walton believes that if Britain acts now and creates a scaled-up rare earths recycling industry, it could become a world leader.
The opportunity is huge, with many emerging technologies such as 5G demanding rare earths, on top of the growing need for established technologies such as phone handsets, microprocessors and wind turbines.
However, the main reason rare earths have been compared to oil, is government policies that will fuel the demand for electric vehicles.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:42AM (2 children)
I mean outside of shredded 'security' ones for certain datacenters, the average consumer hard disk consumption is going down dramatically, which meats the future supply of magnet recycling from Hard Disks is going to dwindle appropriately as well. Given all this, how much of a bumper market will recycling of hard disk magnets really turn out to be? Certainly not a 'world leading' one, especially after you factor in the shipping costs to get all the hard disk scrap sent to Britain, whether from Ireland, Europe, China(ha!), or the US/Canada(also hah, except for maybe for some locations on the east coast.)
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 10 2020, @03:56AM (1 child)
In a few years they can start recycling the rare earth magnets out of electric car motors -- orders of magnitude larger than HDD magnets. I'm thinking primarily from wrecked cars at first, the average life of an electric car should be fairly long.
(Score: 2) by Username on Wednesday June 10 2020, @12:25PM
Do they still make magnetos? I thought all modern electric motors used field coils.