A Canadian startup has a disruptive vision for securing a reliable supply of domestic rare earth elements: recycling electronic waste.
What’s happening:
- Cyclic Materials has landed $4.9M CAD in new funding from the government of Canada to accelerate their recycling technology for rare earth elements and critical minerals
The big idea:
- Cyclic Materials has developed an innovative recycling technology that is capable of recovering rare earth elements and critical metals from electronic waste that would otherwise end up in landfills
- By recycling and repurposing rare earth elements and critical metals, Cyclic Materials is able to significantly reduce the carbon dioxide emissions and water consumption that is caused by mining projects aiming to discover new deposits of critical minerals
Why it matters:
- Rare earth elements are essential for everything from wind turbines to MRI machines to the production of electric vehicles, which has led to an uptick in North American publicly traded companies searching for new domestic deposits of rare earth elements
- China is the largest supplier of rare earth elements globally, which has become a looming problem for North American companies as China continues to limit the exportation of many important metals and minerals such as antimony
Going deeper:
- The Canadian government has been making natural resources and critical minerals a major focus recently, previously committing more than a billion dollars for mining projects located in Canada as well as recently providing new funding for the processing of the mineral bastnaesite which contains rare earth elements
- Technology giant Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) previously made a strategic investment into Cyclic Materials to accelerate their capacity to recycle hard drives which contain rare earth elements and can be reused for the manufacturing of new electronics
