During recent years technological innovations have resulted in numerous applications using rare earth metals. These new applications have led to a steep increase in their demand. Until now, there has been almost no recycling of rare earth oxides (REO). CRS, together with our partners, has developed a process to extract Yttrium (Y), Europium (Eu) and other REO’s (La, Dy, Tb, Ce) from used compact fluorescent lamps (CFL).
Our partner collects the waste CFL’s and removes the mercury, metal caps and ballast. The net result is a glass powder that is a mixture of glass, metal and rare earth oxides (REO). CRS extracts the REO from the powder with a complex combination of hydraulic and chemical separation processes. The recovered REO is sold to rare earth metal refiners who make the pure rare earth metals (REE) which are subsequently converted back into the phosphor powders used in CFL’s. It is not only protecting the environment, but also recovering an extremely valuable resource.