Sustainable route for Nd recycling from waste electronic components featured with unique element-specific sorting enabling simplified hydrometallurgy

Neodymium being an expensive strategic metal indispensable for our society, the key issue is to secure its supply and make usage sustainable. However, with less than 1% of it currently recycled, we are far from achieving this. Although some work underway recycle electrical engines’ large Nd-based magnet alloys, little attention has been given recycling small Nd-containing ceramic-based components, despite their 12% share Nd market. Herein, demonstrate economically viable process such components found in electronic wastes. We tackled high dilution complex e-wastes through upstream deployment simultaneous disassembly, machine vision multi-energy X-ray transmission sorting (first-of-its-kind), followed by precise beneficiation virtue difference magnetism, density fracture toughness. The resulting concentrates mainly dielectric ceramics (BaO-Nd2O3-TiO2), containing 38.3 wt% Nd. refractory general, can be simply leached concentrated HNO3 these dielectrics selectivity under optimized conditions. Subsequently, recovered oxalate precipitation while 60% regenerated. To elaborate on mechanism leaching, related kinetics, thermodynamics bonding nature were investigated theoretical computations. overall recovery efficiency reaches 91.1% ending up commercial-grade Nd2O3 (> 99.6%). More importantly, route estimated profitable within four years based conservative margins. This provides a promising strategy recover rarely recycled metals towards closed-loop design.