Hitachi develops technology to recycle rare earths

Tuesday 07th December, 04:23 AM JST

TOKYO —

Hitachi Ltd said Monday it has developed technology to collect rare earths from components in electric appliances and recycle enough for about 10 percent of the group’s usage from 2013.

China’s recent de facto export ban gave impetus to efforts to procure the metals from a stable source, and Hitachi also plans to accelerate work to secure new supplies and develop alternative materials, it said.

In a similar development, Toshiba Corp said last month it has developed technology for recovering rare earth minerals in the process of extracting uranium from a mine.

Hitachi said it aims to fully operate a recycling facility as early as 2013 and extract about 50-60 tons of rare earths from such electric parts as motors in hard disk drives and compressors in air conditioners.

It has developed devices to effectively collect magnets which include rare earths from used HDDs and compressors as well as a media to extract two rare earth elements of neodymium and dysprosium from crumbled magnet powder without using chemicals.

Using the new technology, the company will be capable of collecting about 2-3 grams of rare earths from one HDD and 20-30 grams of the metals from one compressor, it said.

The collecting device for HDD is designed to disassemble HDDs into such components as magnets and disks by vibrating and applying shocks to them, and is capable of handling 200,000 HDDs annually, while the device for compressors can deal with 60,000 compressors annually.