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Date: 21-apr-2025 | By: Nuztrend Team
In a groundbreaking sustainability initiative, Western Digital and Microsoft have teamed up to recover rare earth elements (REEs) from decommissioned hard disk drives (HDDs), offering a new blueprint for environmentally conscious data center management.
Announced on April 17, 2025, the joint effort—called the Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program—partners with Critical Materials Recycling (CMR) and PedalPoint Recycling. Together, they aim to extract valuable materials such as neodymium, praseodymium, and dysprosium from retired servers and data storage hardware.
At the heart of the program is an innovative acid-free dissolution recycling (ADR) technique developed by CMR. Unlike traditional recycling that often involves toxic chemicals, ADR enables the separation of rare earths and base metals without environmental harm. It boasts a ~90% elemental recovery rate and an ~80% capture rate of all shredded material.
Even more impressive, the process yields a 95% reduction in greenhouse gas emissions when compared to rare earth extraction via conventional mining.
Microsoft is providing a consistent stream of materials from its Chicago Circular Center, where over 12,000 servers are decommissioned each month. Components recovered include not just rare earths, but also gold, copper, aluminum, and steel.
Recovered materials are reintroduced into the U.S. supply chain and support industries like electric vehicles, wind power, semiconductors, and other advanced electronics. This helps reduce reliance on foreign rare earth suppliers—a growing concern in today’s shifting geopolitical landscape.
Western Digital emphasizes that the recycling process also enhances data security. Components from HDDs are destroyed as part of the recovery operation, ensuring that sensitive information cannot be retrieved even as raw materials are repurposed.
“This is a step forward in sustainable innovation,” said leaders from both companies. “We’re not just recycling—we’re building a circular economy around data infrastructure.”
The project could serve as a global model for future IT and cloud service providers. As data centers expand and hardware refresh cycles shorten, initiatives like this highlight the growing intersection between climate goals and technology management.
Source: Western Digital Newsroom
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