neoCtech Corp.
Investigation of an electrified chlorination process for extraction of critical rare metals from electronic waste
Electronic devices are an inseparable part of today's life, while these device's lifetime is less than ten years in some cases like mobile phones. Accordingly, a huge amount of electronic waste (44.7 million tons in 2016) is generated, which causes serious health problems for human beings, and needs sustainable processing. NeoCtech is proposing an innovative electrified chlorination process to recover metals from E-waste via a sustainable and environmental-friendly process.
Extraction of Rare Earth Metals from E-waste
NeoCtech aims at producing critical rare earth elements (REE), e.g. Neodymium and Dysprosium, from end-of-life materials. REE are called rare because there are few viable primary resources to extract them due to mineralogy of REE bearing ores and physicochemical properties of REE. NeoCtech is carrying out R&D to address the circular economy of REE, and to produce them from secondary resources: REE from recycled waste magnets where REE constitute about 30 wt% of mass. NeoCtech has developed a hybrid and cost-effctive process for the production of rare earth oxides from waste NdFeB magnets.
Recycling Critical Rare Metals From Waste Magnets
Rare earth elements are critical metals in clean-tech and high-tech industries such as electric vehicles, wind turbines, solar panels, consumer electronic devices, and quantum computers/telecommunication. NeoCtech corp. has developed a clean and energy efficient process to produce rare earth metals from recycled waste magnets at a small scale. The proposed research project is about techno-economic evaluation of upscaling NeoCtech's processes in order to pave the way towards building up a minimum viable prototype (MVP) that operates continuously.