The problem of recycling materials used in the production of electronics has been discussed for a long time and in many ways. There are a host of government and industry programs that encourage taking the “good stuff” out of broken or obsolete electronic hardware. There are also counter examples. Shredded electronics, along with gold, silver, platinum and rare earth elements, are used as filler to make road surfaces. Such a plant, for example, operates in Tennessee, USA. This is also a way out of the waste disposal problem. But most programs still consider reusing valuable resources.
In the second half of last year, Google received six Seagate hard drives for testing, in which the rare-earth magnets in the head control units were not new, but removed from used drives or from faulty hard drives, also, by the way, decommissioned from Google data centers . It is reported that all disks (magnets) that have received a second life work like new. The technology for using used magnets is being developed by the Dutch company Teleplan. The drives are manually disassembled in a clean room, the magnets are removed and then sent to Seagate, which installs them in new drives if the magnet design is not outdated. These are the HDDs Google received for testing. However, such methods are not suitable for mass recycling of hard drives. By the way, in the USA alone, about 20 million hard drives are written off every year - that’s the scale of the problem.
A team of engineers at the famed Oak Ridge National Atomic Energy Laboratory is proposing a way to quickly extract rare-earth magnets from disks for reuse. It should be noted that the US Department of Energy is dealing with the problem of reusing rare earth elements, and it considers this “the first line of defense in protecting national security.” The laboratory found that in the vast majority of cases, the block of heads with magnets is located in the lower left corner. A not particularly cunning machine cuts off this corner with a margin on all hard drives. Then the chopped corners are heated in an oven and the magnets demagnetized during this process are easily shaken out of the trash. Thus, the laboratory can process up to 7200 hard drives per day. The extracted magnets can be reused or processed into the original rare earth raw material.
Momentum Technologies and Urban Mining Company are engaged in processing magnets into raw materials and back. Momentum Technologies crushes hard drives into dust and extracts magnetic material from it, after which it turns it into oxide powder, and Urban Mining Company creates new magnets from the powder, which are then sent to manufacturers of electric motors or for other products. The work of these companies and other projects to extract rare earth elements from recycled materials is carried out by the International Electronics Manufacturing Initiative (iNEMI), which, as mentioned above, is directly supervised by the US Department of Energy.
Finally, Wisconsin-based Cascade Asset Management is also part of the iNEMI program. The company recycles (destroys) hard drives on orders from corporations. For fear of data leakage, the disks are physically destroyed. But they could still work, Cascade Asset Management and iNEMI are sure. The problem is that corporations do not trust existing methods for cleaning information on magnetic media. If they could be convinced that data destruction was reliable, many hard drives could be put back on the market. It's better than destroying it, and you can still make money. I wonder if this was the reason for the development of the global blockchain tracking system for hard drives, which Seagate and IBM are jointly developing? They sent it for recycling, and the drive surfaced somewhere on the market as new.
Source: 3dnews.ru