Climate Insider Brief:
- Cyclic Materials, a company specialising in recycling rare earth elements from end-of-life hard drives, has received an equity investment from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund.
- This funding supports Cyclic’s efforts in building a circular supply chain for critical metals and aligns with Microsoft’s goal of achieving zero waste and promoting a circular economy.
- Cyclic has developed the CC360TM technology, designed to recover rare earth elements from hard drives, which are typically not processed in conventional IT asset disposal methods.
PRESS RELEASE – TORONTO–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Cyclic Materials, an advanced metals recycling company building a circular supply chain for rare earth elements and other critical metals, today announced it 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.
Over the past two years, Cyclic has developed a patent-pending technology, CC360TM, 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 are currently not recovered. With the CC360TM, 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. These separated magnets can then be processed by Cyclic Materials’ 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,” said Brandon Middaugh, Senior Director, Climate Innovation Fund, Microsoft. “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.”
Established in 2021, Cyclic Materials is an industry leader developing technologies that are capable of economically, sustainably and domestically transforming end-of-life (EOL) products into valuable raw materials. The recycling of rare earths delivers significant environmental benefits in comparison to mining processes, including a reduced carbon footprint and water usage. Cyclic Materials recently opened its Kingston-based “Hub100” plant, deploying its proprietary hydrometallurgical technology, REEPure and helping fulfill the ever-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 TM 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 (SLS). “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.”
“We’re thrilled by this endorsement from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund as a key strategic investor who is like minded in creating a circular supply chain for rare earth elements contained in hard drives used in their data center operations,” said Ahmad Ghahreman, co-founder and CEO of Cyclic Materials. “This support enables us to accelerate the deployment of our commercial facilities, which is a critical step in growing the domestic supply of rare earths in North America that support the energy transition. Additionally, we value the input that SLS has provided, helping us to validate our new CC360TM technology that we believe will prove invaluable to large data center operators such as Microsoft as they work towards their circularity and sustainability goals.”
To learn more about Cyclic Materials, please visit www.cyclicmaterials.earth.
