Cyclic Materials Opens First U.S. Rare Earth Magnet Recycling Facility
Cyclic Materials has opened its first commercial-scale rare earth magnet recycling facility, it announced earlier this month (Manufacturing Dive).
What’s going on: The $20 million facility in Mesa, Arizona, “can process up to 25,000 metric tons of recycled scrap per year, using an automated separation technology that recovers magnets from discarded electronics, robotics, medical devices and other materials.”
- The 144,000-square-foot plant is the Toronto-based company’s “largest rare earth magnet recycling operation by annual processing capacity” and its first U.S. facility.
- A second U.S. Cyclic Materials facility, in South Carolina, is under construction and slated to open in 2028.
Why it’s important: “The Mesa facility is part of Cyclic Materials’ buildout of U.S. recovery infrastructure and advances the Trump administration’s efforts to bolster domestic rare earth supply chains.”
- The U.S. is mostly reliant on foreign sources of rare earths, whose market China dominates.
- This summer, the administration prioritized recoverable critical minerals and materials by adding them to the Defense Production Act.
How it works: The Mesa plant uses “proprietary MagCycle technology that mechanically separates magnets from steel to produce rare earth magnet material called Mag-Xtract.”
- More than 7,000 metric tons of scrap has already been delivered to the facility.
Big investments: Cyclic Materials closed a $75 million funding round earlier this year to expand U.S. and Canadian operations.
- In August, the company secured an additional $75 million in U.S.-focused funding.
