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.
