Western Digital and Microsoft launch HDD recycling program to recover rare earths from e-waste

Ahead-looking: Western Digital has launched a large-scale exhausting disk drive recycling initiative in partnership with Microsoft, Vital Supplies Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling. This system, referred to as the Superior Recycling and Uncommon Earth Materials Seize Program, goals to sort out a longstanding drawback within the tech business: the lack of invaluable uncommon earth components and different crucial supplies when information middle drives attain the top of their lifecycle and are usually destroyed, producing important e-waste.

Though solid-state drives have turn into the usual for private computer systems, mechanical exhausting drives stay the spine of information facilities worldwide. When these drives are retired, they’re usually shredded for information safety, and their parts – starting from aluminum and metal to uncommon earth magnets – often find yourself in landfills.

The environmental price is additional compounded by the truth that mining new uncommon earth components corresponding to dysprosium, neodymium, and praseodymium is very energy-intensive and produces substantial greenhouse fuel emissions. Including to the problem, China, which dominates international uncommon earth materials manufacturing, has lately imposed export restrictions on a number of key supplies, threatening the provision chain for US expertise corporations.

Western Digital’s program goals to reclaim crucial supplies domestically. The method begins with gathering end-of-life drives from Microsoft’s US information facilities, that are then shredded and sorted by PedalPoint Recycling. The extracted magnets and metal are despatched to CMR, the place an acid-free dissolution recycling expertise recovers uncommon earth components. This copper salt-based course of selectively leaches out uncommon earth oxides with outstanding purity (as much as 99.5 p.c) whereas avoiding the cruel chemical compounds that may injury uncommon earths and different invaluable metals like aluminum.

The pilot program has already diverted roughly 47,000 kilos of exhausting drives, SSDs, and mounting caddies from landfills or much less efficient recycling streams. Based on Western Digital, the method has recovered over 90 p.c of the uncommon earth components and about 80 p.c of all shredded materials by mass.

The environmental advantages are substantial. A life cycle evaluation cited in Western Digital’s whitepaper estimates that the brand new course of generates 95 p.c fewer greenhouse fuel emissions than conventional mining and refining strategies. By retaining all the uncommon earth oxide manufacturing course of inside the USA, the initiative additionally reduces transportation emissions and strengthens the resilience of the home provide chain.

Microsoft, which offered the preliminary batch of drives for this system, sees this as a vital step towards a extra round economic system in tech. “HDDs are very important to our information middle infrastructure, and advancing a round provide chain is a core focus for Microsoft,” mentioned Chuck Graham, the corporate’s company vp for cloud sourcing, provide chain, sustainability, and safety. “This pilot program has proven {that a} sustainable and economically viable end-of-life administration for HDDs is achievable.”

The expertise behind the recycling course of was initially developed on the Vital Supplies Innovation Hub at Ames Nationwide Laboratory and has been scaled from lab to demonstration in simply eight years.

The potential influence of this program is huge. Based on the Monetary Instances, there have been 23,000 information facilities housing 70 million servers in 2022 – every containing a number of exhausting drives that usually final solely three to 5 years. In the meantime, international e-waste is projected to succeed in 75 million tons by 2030.

“Western Digital is at the moment increasing the HDD uncommon earth materials seize program primarily based on the profitable pilot with Microsoft,” Jackie Jung, WD’s VP of worldwide operations technique and company sustainability, told Tom’s {Hardware}. “This program is now in growth with quite a lot of our hyperscale clients.”