SESSION D3 / Glass Room / 16 May 2024 / 09:00 - 10:00
Workshop: NEW-RE Project Strategies for Circular Economy of permanent magnets
Chair / Presidente: Laura Mascheretti, Pietro Romano (IT)
Rare Earths are listed among Critical Raw Materials, and – considering the fast-growing demand for electric vehicles – their importance will further increase over the next decades. The traditional methods for extracting REEs (Rare Earth Elements) from minerals require high energy inputs and produce large amounts of waste, while the European recovery rate of Rare Earths from Permanent Magnets (PMs) is currently only 1%. Moreover, the manual dismantling of hard disk drives (HDDs) is extremely time consuming and repetitive, and the extraction of PMs from electronic equipment is very difficult.
EU countries have limited primary sources of Rare Earths: therefore, more than 95% of REEs is currently imported from China. In order to reduce the importations of these Critical Raw Materials, the New-RE project - acronym for “Neodymium and Rare Earth from Waste Recycling” - aims at improving the end-of-life management of permanent magnets, by ensuring high-quality material recycling. The New-RE pilot plant will allow to recover Rare Earths oxides from the PMs contained in hard disk drives, motors of electric vehicles (EVs), and other WEEE.
Introductory lectures:
L. Mascheretti, A. Tori, M. Zitta, M. Piessens, J.R. Peeters (IT)
NEW-RE Project - Strategies to improve Permanent Magnets EoL value chain: a focus on automated dismantling
P. Romano, S. Rahmati, M. Passadoro, L. Taglieri, L. Fratocchi, F. Gallo, F. Vegliò (IT)
Simulation and economical analysis of hydro-Nd process for the recovery of rare earth from EoL permanent magnets: NEW-RE and INSPIREE projects
