Looking at some of the concentrations for neodymium and praseodymium... why _isn't_ magnet recycling more of thing? Certainly extracting those elements from waste is cheaper than raw ore.
How do you collect enough rare earth magnets to be worth recycling them? I don't mean where do you find that many magnets, I mean how do you store, transport and then process them. You'd have to demagnetize them first, right?
It doesn't seem like the temperature requirements are outside of something one could do with pretty low end hardware, but the problem is that a lot of the equipment you might have to say do this in your garage would be ferrous, which is problematic. Maybe a recycling center wouldn't have that problem?
I took mine out and use them as refrigerator magnets. They are awesomely strong. No more cheap magnets sliding down the refrigerator not holding weight.
Edit: Daughter really liked using the shiny platters in art projects (after degaussing with the RE magnets). I've reused some of the dc motors in other projects (arduino type stuff). All that's left is the small circuit board, read/write head and metal body to recycle.
Strange article. Economy in the dump. 75% inflation rate rendering everyone's money useless. Great time to "discover" a massive stockpile of hard assets.
The article is vague about the identities of the elements. They tend to occur together, but some are way more valuable than others. Cerium, for example, is considered a "rare earth" but is not that rare at all:
> Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common metals such as lead (13 ppm) and tin (2.1 ppm). Thus, despite its position as one of the so-called rare-earth metals, cerium is actually not rare at all. ...
Honest question. What is the distribution throughout the crust though? If something that is 66 ppm but near uniformily distributed could be much harder to extract then something that is 2.2 ppm but occurs I distinct viens.
That's exactly what makes most of the rare earth elements "rare": they are common in the Earth's crust but rarely concentrated into easily mined deposits. Neodymium and praseodymium are also more common than tin but significantly more costly than tin because they don't form ore bodies like tin does under geochemical influences.
It is nothing to do with anything. Copper is relatively abundant by this measure, but almost everyone who I know who has a view on copper see the future supply situation as terrible. There is politics, financial cycles, actual site economics...I mean the US right now is the perfect example of this, centuries of discovered natural gas reserves that is proven economic to take out of the ground, and natural gas is skyrocketing...it isn't that simple.
God damn. If nothing this will be used to make ppl force vote for Erdogan in 2023... Just another propoganda tool to vote him :( And I was naively keeping up my hopes for this Turkey's 100th birthday elections, but it seems like he will follow a Nazarbayev model for himself. I can only hope him to get pulled into his bubble where he leaves important decisions to liable, honest people. But unless his "magistrates" come down it does not seem possible.
I don't quite see how Erdogan would be any better at exploiting that resource than anybody else. Worse actually, because he'll have trouble attracting foreign investments...
It's mostly light rare earth elements. Over half of it is cerium and most of the rest is lanthanum. Most of the economic value is in the elements that are not cerium or lanthanum. It appears to have about the same proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (valuable light rare earth elements used in magnets) as the Mountain Pass, California mine, plus more terbium (more expensive heavy rare earth element also useful in magnets) than Mountain Pass.
Also on that slide: "has average 3.14% grade". I assume that doesn't mean the rock consists of 3.14% of the target element, but is 3.14% of whatever ore they're targeting, right?
Probably metric tonnes, but it's weird to use "Mt" to mean metric tonne rather than megatonne. The symbol for metric tonne is "t" [0]. It would certainly be less ambiguous to just spell it out.
Despite their name, rare earth elements aren't rare at all - in fact, they're all over the place. They're in the US, Canada, Brazil, Australia, Vietnam, China, India, Russia - and of course Turkey. [1]
Most of the refining takes place in China, though, because only China is willing to pay the toxic environmental cost associated with actually doing so. This is what that process looks like. [2]
It's good to diversify the supply to be sure, but the question is, will Turkey be willing to pay the environmental cost of refining? Or will China continue to take that on. We're not short of input ore, so if not, I suspect the market will continue to look much like it does in spite of this discovery.
Readit News
It doesn't seem like the temperature requirements are outside of something one could do with pretty low end hardware, but the problem is that a lot of the equipment you might have to say do this in your garage would be ferrous, which is problematic. Maybe a recycling center wouldn't have that problem?
They stick to metal.
Edit: Daughter really liked using the shiny platters in art projects (after degaussing with the RE magnets). I've reused some of the dc motors in other projects (arduino type stuff). All that's left is the small circuit board, read/write head and metal body to recycle.
They’re almost certainly exaggerated, and are often announced to satisfy investors with a healthy - temporary - uptick in stock price.
> Cerium is the most abundant of all the lanthanides, making up 66 ppm of the Earth's crust; this value is just behind that of copper (68 ppm), and cerium is even more abundant than common metals such as lead (13 ppm) and tin (2.1 ppm). Thus, despite its position as one of the so-called rare-earth metals, cerium is actually not rare at all. ...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cerium
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
Deleted Comment
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31993668
It's mostly light rare earth elements. Over half of it is cerium and most of the rest is lanthanum. Most of the economic value is in the elements that are not cerium or lanthanum. It appears to have about the same proportion of neodymium and praseodymium (valuable light rare earth elements used in magnets) as the Mountain Pass, California mine, plus more terbium (more expensive heavy rare earth element also useful in magnets) than Mountain Pass.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tonne
Dead Comment
Most of the refining takes place in China, though, because only China is willing to pay the toxic environmental cost associated with actually doing so. This is what that process looks like. [2]
It's good to diversify the supply to be sure, but the question is, will Turkey be willing to pay the environmental cost of refining? Or will China continue to take that on. We're not short of input ore, so if not, I suspect the market will continue to look much like it does in spite of this discovery.
[1] https://www.visualcapitalist.com/rare-earth-elements-where-i...
[2] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20150402-the-worst-place-...