Google tries to recover rare earth magnets from hard disk

Google and other companies in the computer industry have been secretly trying to recycle hard drives with two rare earth solid magnets. As Grist reports, future shortages of rare earth metals and environmental damage caused by rare earth mining have prompted technology companies to investigate whether hard drives can be mined.

According to Grist, about 22 million hard drives in data centers reach their useful life each year, Cambridge said. When an operator replaces an old drive with a new drive every three to five years, the old drive is usually destroyed impolitely. Rare earth elements that require a lot of resources and energy to extract and convert into magnets have disappeared into the ocean of aluminum waste.

In the fall of 2019, researchers manually dismantled outdated hard drives at Google's data center in Metz County, Oklahoma, to remove a 2-inch component called a magnet component. Magnet assembly is a key part of hard disk drive, which consists of two powerful rare earth magnets.

Scientists extracted 6100 magnetic components in six weeks, all of which are as good as new. The magnets were then sent to a hard disk drive factory in Thailand. They are installed in a new drive and then redeployed to the global data center.

The researchers believe that if experts can recycle all these devices, they could provide more than 5% of the market for all rare earth magnets outside China. It may help to meet the needs of the information technology sector and renewable energy companies. A group of American researchers, technology companies, hardware manufacturers and e-waste recyclers are just beginning to study how to recycle these rare earths and give them new life.

These stakeholders issued a report in 2019 outlining several potential strategies. These include wiping and reusing entire hard drives, reusing and removing magnet assemblies, destroying old hard drive magnets, using powder to make new magnets, and obtaining clean rare earth elements from damaged drives. Each strategy has its own set of experiments. This is because manually dismantling magnet assemblies is time-consuming; removing rare earths from the technology can be chemical or energy-intensive, can lead to significant waste, and installation of any of them requires the support of a wide range of stakeholders in the global supply chain.

Even the small supply chain changes required to install used or recycled rare earth magnets in new drives are "challenging". Especially when you have to start with a small number of new technologies. As a result, Google has set the goal of establishing a scalable method for recycling rare earth magnets. Ines Sousa, co-author of the new report and Google's supplier environmental impact project manager, says there are still some hurdles to clear before it becomes a reality.

The requirement for high purity in the process of magnet recovery "because current hard drives are particularly sensitive to small particles" and the fact that hard drives are constantly developing, leading to new magnet designs every few years, is one of the difficulties they have to face.

While it may take years to recycle rare earth magnets in large quantities using any method, there are some ways to help speed up the process. The federal government has sponsored a large number of studies to create cleaner and more efficient technologies to recover rare earth magnet metals through research on key materials at Ames National Laboratory.