Digital storage firm Western Digital has launched an initiative in collaboration with Microsoft, Critical Materials Recycling, and PedalPoint Recycling to retrieve and recycle rare earth minerals from disused hard drives in data centers.

The Advanced Recycling and Rare Earth Material Capture Program has already recycled 50,000 pounds of shredded end-of-life hard disk drives (HDD), mounting caddies, and other materials into critical materials, including rare earth elements such as Neodymium, Praseodymium, and Dysprosium. The materials were collected from several Microsoft data centers across the US.

The pilot program is pioneering an “eco-friendly non-acid process,” which, according to the companies, not only recaptures essential rare earth elements but also extracts metals like gold, copper, aluminum, and steel, which are subsequently fed back into the US supply chain.

The acid-free dissolution recycling technology was developed at the Critical Materials Innovation Hub, located in the Ames National Laboratory, a US Department of Energy national laboratory located in Iowa.

“This project isn’t just a milestone; it’s a blueprint for large-scale, domestic recycling of essential metals and materials that will drive sustainable progress for years to come,” said Jackie Jung, vice president of Global Operations Strategy and Corporate Sustainability at Western Digital.

The pilot has already shown significant promise, the companies claim, achieving a 90 percent yield recovery of elemental and rare earth materials. In addition, according to a life cycle analysis methodology, the technology reduces greenhouse gas emissions by 95 percent in comparison to traditional mining and processing practices.

“This is a tremendous effort by all parties involved. This pilot program has shown that a sustainable and economically viable end-of-life (EOL) management for HDDs is achievable,” said Chuck Graham, corporate vice president, Cloud Sourcing, Supply Chain, Sustainability, and Security at Microsoft.

Last week, Microsoft reported that it had reached a 90.9 percent rate of reuse and recycling for servers and components in 2024. In addition, Microsoft has also developed a circular supply chain initiative where decommissioned servers and hardware components from its data center portfolio are recycled and reused at onsite recycling centers.

Its first Circular Center was launched in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2020. Since then, the company has built five additional facilities in the US. It also has planned facilities in Cardiff, Wales; New South Wales, Australia; and San Antonio, Texas.

The initiatives are part of a broader goal to be carbon negative by 2030 and to remove all the carbon it has emitted since its founding in 1975 by 2050.