Hard Drive magnets account for 10% of all the neodymium produced and over 1 million Hard Drives are manufactured every day. It is estimated that over 12 billion have been manufactured to-date.
When Hard Drives fail or come to the end of their lives the common practice in Data Centres is to have them shredded and disposed of. Shredding destroys the valuable magnets which cannot be recovered in any recycling process thereafter.
A new environmentally safe and secure recycling process that will recover 100% of the neodymium is now available.
Magnets can be easily removed from Hard Drives and then ‘disintegrated’ through a new environmentally friendly recycling process into their component elements – neodymium, dysprosium, iron, boron and nickel. The Neodymium is then separated and reused by magnet manufacturers as recycled high grade mineral. True scalable urban mining for the new Circular Economy.
What we have here is Nd2Fe14B . A neodymium hard drive magnet of a few grams can lift a thousand times its own weight. These magnets are cheaper, lighter, and stronger than samarium-cobalt magnets. (SOURCE WIKIPEDIA)
