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Cyclic Materials announced this week has received an equity investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund, an initiative dedicated to accelerating technology development and deployment of new climate innovations.
This investment is representative of Microsoft’s commitment to a circular economy and interest in hard drive rare earth element recycling, the Kingston, Ontario-based metals recycling firm said in a press release.
Over the past two years, Cyclic has developed a patent-pending technology called “CC360” to specifically address the challenge of recovering rare earths contained in end-of-life hard drives. While hard drives are typically sent to an IT asset disposal (ITAD) company at the end of life, this disposal process is designed for data destruction, followed by shredding of drives for the recovery of other metals such as gold and silver. The rare earths contained, however, are currently not recovered.
With the CC360, ITAD companies can separate a portion of hard drives for rare earth recovery, while retaining the rest of the hard drives for their traditional process, Cyclic said, adding that these separated magnets can then be processed by the company’s processing technologies, unlocking an additional value stream from hard drive disposal.
“Microsoft is working to achieve zero waste across our direct operations, products, and packaging by 2030. This means adopting a circular economy approach,” Brandon Middaugh, senior director of the Climate Innovation Fund, stated.
“As demand for rare earth elements continues to grow in importance, we’re excited to support the creation of a sustainable supply of these materials with this investment,” he added.
Established in 2021, Cyclic Materials aims to develop technologies that can economically, sustainably and domestically transform end-of-life (EOL) products into valuable raw materials. The company recently opened its “Hub100” plant in Kingston, deploying its proprietary hydrometallurgical technology, REEPure, and helping fulfill the increasing demand for domestic sources of mixed rare earth oxide (MREO) in North America.
“We have been working with Cyclic over the past few months to trial the use of the CC360 in our operations. We have seen tremendous performance improvements through the development and achieved throughput of one hard drive per second,” said Sean Magann, chief commercial officer at Sims Lifecycle Services.
“This solution enables us to drive further value out of disposed hard drives, by reclaiming the critical rare earths, while maintaining the data security of the hard drives being disposed. An additional benefit is the reduction of magnets clogging our shredders. We look forward to deploying this technology across our operations.”
