Periodic Reporting for period 2 - REEPRODUCE (Dismantling and recycling Rare Earth Elements from End-of-life products for the European Green Transition)
Reporting period: 2023-11-01 to 2025-04-30
Europe's ambitious energy and climate goals are heavily dependent on critical raw materials such as Rare Earth Elements (REEs). The largest end-user of REEs is the permanent magnet industry for electric mobility and renewable energy technologies. The growth in those strategic sectors till 2050 is expected to increase the demand of REEs used in the magnets, e.g. Nd, Dy. However, Europe depends almost 100% on REEs imports and there are no market-ready substitutes. Despite the fact that significant amounts of EoL products containing REE-based magnets are collected in Europe, the current recycling processes do not allow their recovery, and are lost downstream.
To face this challenge, the REEPRODUCE project aims at setting up, for the first time, a resilient and complete European REEs-recycling value chain, at industrial scale for the recovery of REEs at competitive cost compared to REEs primary production with environmentally friendly and socially sustainable technologies. REEPRODUCE will capitalize on the knowledge generated in previous projects and aim to solve all remaining technical challenges along the value chain to construct pilots able to recycle 70 t of PMs per year from variety of EoL products bearing Nd-magnets. Additionally it will demonstrate the conversion of PMs extracted from many different EoL products into high purity rare earth oxide mixtures and rare earth alloys that will be used in the manufacture of new magnets.
To face this challenge, the REEPRODUCE project aims at setting up, for the first time, a resilient and complete European REEs-recycling value chain, at industrial scale for the recovery of REEs at competitive cost compared to REEs primary production with environmentally friendly and socially sustainable technologies. REEPRODUCE will capitalize on the knowledge generated in previous projects and aim to solve all remaining technical challenges along the value chain to construct pilots able to recycle 70 t of PMs per year from variety of EoL products bearing Nd-magnets. Additionally it will demonstrate the conversion of PMs extracted from many different EoL products into high purity rare earth oxide mixtures and rare earth alloys that will be used in the manufacture of new magnets.
REEPRODUCE project aims at setting up a resilient and complete European rare earth elements (REE) recycling value chain, at industrial scale for the recovery of REEs at competitive cost compared to primary production, with environmentally friendly, and socially sustainable technologies. The project will demonstrate a complete closed-loop REE-based magnets' recycling process, from EoL products (WEEE) to the manufacture of magnets with the recycled material. The technologies developed along the whole REEPRODUCE solution will be demonstrated at Pilot scale (TRL7) in 7 Pilots that will be engineered, constructed, and validated in several locations at the partners sites, including end-of-life (EoL) products' recyclers, REEs-intensive material producers, metal recyclers/producers, and magnet manufacturers.
During the first period of the project 2 pilot units have been constructed: the intelligent sorting system and the automatized dismantling pilot, and validation trials started at the recyclers' facilities. Besides, optimization of processes, and engineering work for the other 5 pilots were ongoing at a good pace.
In the second period the development and construction of pilots and demonstrators for the recovery of sintered Nd-based permanent magnets from a variety of e-motors, hard disc components and the iron fraction from shredded devices, have completed. The machinery has been installed at different locations for validation in terms of functionality and capacity.
The magnets extracted have been provided to the advanced hydrometallurgical pilot, which has been constructed and commissioned, and is currently ready to start the validation trials and produce REE-oxalates from the different batches of discarded magnets.
In parallel, the existing high temperature electrolysis cell to convert REE-oxides to REE-metal/alloys has been re-designed and further up-scaled to meet the targets of the REEPRODUCE project. The pilot is one of its kind, with automatised feeding and tapping (metal recovery) operations, while safeguuarding the environmental performance of the process.
In addition to the technical activities, the project has been active in communication and dissemination activities, which will be even more important in the next period of the project aiming at maximizing the impact of the developed REEPRODUCE solution.
Internal exploitation workshops within the consortium memebers have been carried out to facilitate the smooth exploitation of results by monitoring: i) ownership of the results and envisaged protection measures; ii) status of relevant foreground generated in the project; iii) valorisation and exploitation routes identified so far. With this information in mind, the project has developed a first exploitation plan, which will be updated and presented to relevant external stakeholders at the end of the project.
During the first period of the project 2 pilot units have been constructed: the intelligent sorting system and the automatized dismantling pilot, and validation trials started at the recyclers' facilities. Besides, optimization of processes, and engineering work for the other 5 pilots were ongoing at a good pace.
In the second period the development and construction of pilots and demonstrators for the recovery of sintered Nd-based permanent magnets from a variety of e-motors, hard disc components and the iron fraction from shredded devices, have completed. The machinery has been installed at different locations for validation in terms of functionality and capacity.
The magnets extracted have been provided to the advanced hydrometallurgical pilot, which has been constructed and commissioned, and is currently ready to start the validation trials and produce REE-oxalates from the different batches of discarded magnets.
In parallel, the existing high temperature electrolysis cell to convert REE-oxides to REE-metal/alloys has been re-designed and further up-scaled to meet the targets of the REEPRODUCE project. The pilot is one of its kind, with automatised feeding and tapping (metal recovery) operations, while safeguuarding the environmental performance of the process.
In addition to the technical activities, the project has been active in communication and dissemination activities, which will be even more important in the next period of the project aiming at maximizing the impact of the developed REEPRODUCE solution.
Internal exploitation workshops within the consortium memebers have been carried out to facilitate the smooth exploitation of results by monitoring: i) ownership of the results and envisaged protection measures; ii) status of relevant foreground generated in the project; iii) valorisation and exploitation routes identified so far. With this information in mind, the project has developed a first exploitation plan, which will be updated and presented to relevant external stakeholders at the end of the project.
Europe continues to be extremely dependent on importing REEs from China (dependency rate is 98-99% of imported REEs). The situation will be very though for many industries in Europe in the coming decade as China will not be able to supply sufficient REEs due to the high forecasted demand worldwide. Hence, Europe needs to diversify its REE supply, and the REEPRODUCE project will set up the foundations for a new resilient business for REE production and supply from European secondary sources (EoL products) that can provide at least 20-30% of the REE need in Europe over the coming two decades.
The REEs production from EoL products seems to be the perfect market opportunity to capitalize and secure an important and strategic value chain for Europe’s green transition. Despite this opportunity, there is still no industrial recycling activity of REEs in Europe. The main bottleneck is related to the maturity of industrial processes capable of producing REEs from EoL products at competitive cost compared to the conventional Chinese production from primary resources. The technological bottleneck is twofold: i) There is a lack of mature technologies to recognize where the Nd-based PMs are placed in different types of EoL products, as well as missing technologies to sort and extract such PMs in a cost-efficient way, with minimized impurities. ii) Mature technologies are missing to purify and recover at high efficiency REEs from Nd-based PMs, esp. with varying content of REEs and impurities.
Despite rigorous targets set by the 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), Europe still lacks a domestic rare-earth processing industry and remains almost entirely dependent on imports. According to Eurostat, the EU imported 12,900 tonnes of REEs in 2024, with 46 % coming from China, 28% from Rusia and 19% from Malasya. The amount imported from China decreased, nevertheless Europe’s supply risk still remains high.
Price volatility is also a persistent challenge. In February 2022, neodymium (Nd) prices rocketed over 350 % above their average for the previous decade, causing uncertainty across green-tech sectors. While prices have moderated since, they remained at approximately USD 94.90/kg in early June 2025, decreasing around 16 % from January 2024.
Therefore, the REEPRODUCE technological developments will unleash the full potential of the REEs-recycling business in Europe by validating the technologies at pilot scale, and showing stakeholders the positive environmental and social footprints, as well as the competitive cost of the REEPRODUCE value chain.
The REEs production from EoL products seems to be the perfect market opportunity to capitalize and secure an important and strategic value chain for Europe’s green transition. Despite this opportunity, there is still no industrial recycling activity of REEs in Europe. The main bottleneck is related to the maturity of industrial processes capable of producing REEs from EoL products at competitive cost compared to the conventional Chinese production from primary resources. The technological bottleneck is twofold: i) There is a lack of mature technologies to recognize where the Nd-based PMs are placed in different types of EoL products, as well as missing technologies to sort and extract such PMs in a cost-efficient way, with minimized impurities. ii) Mature technologies are missing to purify and recover at high efficiency REEs from Nd-based PMs, esp. with varying content of REEs and impurities.
Despite rigorous targets set by the 2024 Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), Europe still lacks a domestic rare-earth processing industry and remains almost entirely dependent on imports. According to Eurostat, the EU imported 12,900 tonnes of REEs in 2024, with 46 % coming from China, 28% from Rusia and 19% from Malasya. The amount imported from China decreased, nevertheless Europe’s supply risk still remains high.
Price volatility is also a persistent challenge. In February 2022, neodymium (Nd) prices rocketed over 350 % above their average for the previous decade, causing uncertainty across green-tech sectors. While prices have moderated since, they remained at approximately USD 94.90/kg in early June 2025, decreasing around 16 % from January 2024.
Therefore, the REEPRODUCE technological developments will unleash the full potential of the REEs-recycling business in Europe by validating the technologies at pilot scale, and showing stakeholders the positive environmental and social footprints, as well as the competitive cost of the REEPRODUCE value chain.