Recycling to save renewables

TRODHEIM, Norway – Rare earth metals are essential materials for wind-turbines and environmentally friendly cars, but they are becoming scarcer by the day.

Norway, represented by SINTEF, the largest independent research organisation in Scandinavia, is on the hunt for suitable methods of recovering them.

Scarcity expected by 2015
Rare-earth metals have been called the “key enablers” of green technologies. They are vital ingredients in the electricity generators in wind-turbines, and in the electric motors that power electric and hybrid road vehicles.

However, the demand for these elements has risen much faster than their supply. Prognoses suggest that many of them will become scarce as early as 2015, so recovery is the first countermeasure.
“It takes a good while to identify new commercially viable deposits and start up new mining operations. If we are to stop the development of wind-turbines and environmentally friendly cars from being slowed down, one important first step will be to recover these minerals from scrap materials. This is what we are trying to do something about,” said SINTEF scientist Ana María Martínez.

Supply under Chinese control

These rare earth metals are used not only in the energy and transport sectors, but also in a wide range of everyday products such as PCs, mobile telephones and LED lamps.
What many of these elements have in common is that they exist in large amounts in the Earth’s crust. However, they are seldom found in high enough concentrations to make extraction commercially viable, which is precisely why they are known as rare earth metals (REMs).

Until now, a single country – China – has supplied the whole world with these metals. It is responsible for 95% of world production of REMs, in spite of the fact that the country sits on only about one-third of global deposits.

During the past few years, however, China has begun to limit its exports of these materials.

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