Recycling of the rare earth elements

The rare earth elements (REE) are vital to modern technologies and society and are amongst the most critical of the critical elements. Despite these facts, typically only around 1% of the REE are recycled from end-products, with the rest deporting to waste and being removed from the materials cycle. This paper provides an overview of the current and future potential of the recycling of the REE, including outlining the significant but currently unrealised potential for increased amounts of REE recycling from end-uses such as permanent magnets, fluorescent lamps, batteries, and catalysts. This future potential will require a significant amount of research but increasing the amount of REE recycling will contribute to the overcoming some of the criticality issues with these elements. These include increased demand, issues over security of supply, and overcoming the balance problem where primary mine-derived sources overproduces lower demand REE without necessarily meeting demands for the higher demand REE.