Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund invests in recycling REEs from hard drives.

Signaling its commitment to a circular economy, Microsoft has made a notable endorsement by strategically investing in Cyclic Materials, a promising startup in advanced metals recycling. Announced July 16, this move by Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund highlights the tech giant's interest in sustainable innovation, particularly in recycling rare earth elements (REEs) from computer hard drives.

Founded in 2021, Cyclic Materials is at the forefront of developing sustainable recycling technologies for REEs and other critical metals. The company's innovative approach aims to create a circular supply chain, reducing reliance on traditional mining and the associated environmental impacts.

At the heart of the company's mission to create a sustainable circular economy are its proprietary technologies, Mag-Xtract and REEPure, cutting-edge processes that enable the efficient recycling of not only rare earth elements but also copper, aluminum, steel, cobalt, and nickel from end-of-life products.

By significantly reducing water usage, waste, and carbon emissions compared to traditional mining methods, Cyclic Materials is among the companies that are helping revolutionize environmental responsibility in the recycling industry.

Adding to its lineup of precision recycling technologies, which began with REEPure for overall rare earth elements and then progressed to the exacting Mag-Xtract for magnets, Cyclic Materials has spent the past two years developing a similarly specialized technology, CC360, specifically designed to recover rare earths from end-of-life hard drives.

Recognizing the potential of Cyclic Materials' innovative approach, Microsoft has made a strategic investment to support the development and deployment of its technologies. This investment is part of the tech giant's broader sustainability initiatives aimed at achieving zero waste and fostering a circular economy.

Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund is dedicated to accelerating technology development and the deployment of new climate innovations. With a goal to achieve zero waste across its direct operations, products, and packaging by 2030, Microsoft is focusing on adopting a circular economy approach to meet its sustainability objectives.

"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 of Microsoft's Climate Innovation Fund. "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."

Typically, hard drives are sent to IT asset disposal (ITAD) companies to undergo data destruction, followed by shredding to recover metals like gold and silver, leaving rare earth elements unrecovered.

However, with the introduction of CC360, ITAD companies can now separate a portion of hard drives for rare earth recovery while retaining the rest for the traditional process. These separated magnets are then processed using Cyclic Materials' technologies, creating an additional value stream from hard drive disposal.

"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 (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."

Recently opening its Hub100 plant in Kingston, Ontario, Cyclic Materials is scaling its proprietary REEPure hydrometallurgical technology to meet North America's ever-increasing demand for domestic sources of mixed rare earth oxide.

With Microsoft's strategic investment, Cyclic Materials is poised to scale up the deployment of its CC360 technology. Leveraging Microsoft's support, the company plans to expand its commercial operations and enhance its rare earth recycling capabilities.

This collaboration also benefits from the input of industry partners like SLS, which has helped validate the new CC360 technology.

"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 Cyclic Materials CEO Ahmad Ghahreman. "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 CC360 technology that we believe will prove invaluable to large data center operators such as Microsoft as they work towards their circularity and sustainability goals."