REEPRODUCE: Dismantling and recycling rare earth elements from end-of-life products
The REEPRODUCE project (Dismantling and recycling Rare Earth Elements from End-of-life products for the European Green Transition) aimed to establish a sustainable and complete European industrial-scale value chain for recycling the rare earth elements (REEs) in permanent magnets.
It capitalised on the knowledge generated by previous R&D projects (REE4EU) and tackled all the remaining technical challenges along the value chain. This innovative technique aimed to produce new permanent magnets using environmentally-friendly technologies at a competitive cost and using end-of-life (EoL) products as a resource.
This EU-funded project contributed to Europe's industrial leadership and increased autonomy in key strategic value chains by ensuring security of supply for raw materials.
Objectives:
- Optimisation of innovative technologies for recycling REEs from EoL products at a competitive cost;
- Engineering, construction, operation and validation of the REEPRODUCE process in different industrial environments across Europe;
- Demonstration of the environmental, social and economic sustainability of the REEPRODUCE process in the recycling of REEs;
- Communication of activities and dissemination of the project’s results towards society and the scientific and industry communities; and
- Maximisation of market uptake of these technologies in Europe.
Policy recommendations for a rare earth permanent magnet recycling value chain in Europe identifies persistent barriers preventing large-scale recycling of rare earth permanent magnets in Europe and sets 5 policy recommendations:
- Ensure labelling and DPP requirements deliver actionable data across the full rare earth recycling value chain.
- Introduce short-term identification measures for EoL products in the waste stream to complement the long-term labelling requirements.
- Establish operational requirements for the identification, separation, extraction and physical recovery of permanent magnets from EoL products.
- Support the scale-up of European REE-recycling from pilot to industrial capacity.
- Ensure coherent definitions, reporting requirements and recovery obligations across policy instruments.