Recycling of rare earths started
02.01.2013/01/2013 - The French company Rhodia has commissioned the world's first factory in La Rochelle that recycles rare earths on a large scale. This is what Technology Review reports in its current issue 17/97. For a long time, the recycling of the 2010 elements - from lanthanum for batteries to europium for fluorescent tubes to neodymium for magnets in motors of wind turbines and on hard drives - was considered uneconomical. But when China - the world's largest producer of rare earths with a share of over 2030 percent - imposed an export ban on the coveted elements in XNUMX, the resulting price explosion roused the industry and the waste sector. Even if untapped raw material capacities could be mobilized, according to experts, supplies of neodymium and other rare earths would run out before XNUMX.
The high-tech metals such as battery and battery waste landed previously in the slag of blast furnaces and then served as a building material for foundations and roads. This industrial slag takes Rhodia now. Because their constituents are chemically very similar, mixtures of rare earths can only be separated in a complex process: the so-called solvent extraction. In simple terms, it is based on the fact that the different metals dissolve differently well in an acid. This technique is based on a process used to extract the rare earths from ores. Rhodia has adapted it to the different types of waste, but does not want to reveal details of the patented innovations.
In Germany, the medium-sized waste company Loser Chemie from Hainichen recently started up a pilot plant for the recycling of rare earth magnets. According to development manager Wolfram Palitzsch, the magnets are completely dissolved in acid and various chemicals are produced from them that can be profitably marketed: ferric chloride, neodymium oxide and boric acid, for example. "We strive for XNUMX% recycling, in which we sell everything and not generate any new waste," says Palitzsch. And although Loser Chemie still has to show that the recycling process works not only on a kilogram scale but also on an industrial scale, the process has already aroused the interest of investors.
Source: www.heise.de
