The Defense Department awarded $5.1 million to Rare Resource Recycling Inc. (REEcycle) in efforts to support its recovery of four elements critical to neodymium iron boron magnets, which enable a variety of defense applications, DOD announced Friday.
The award, granted through the Defense Production Act’s Title III, also supports the Pentagon’s efforts to build a mine-to-magnet domestic supply chain capacity.
“A resilient mine-to-magnet supply chain will require diverse sources for rare earth elements,” Laura Taylor-Kale, assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said in a statement. “REEcycle’s capabilities will help the United States become less dependent on foreign sources by extracting full value from material that would otherwise end up in landfills.”
The project being funded would restart an existing demonstration facility and advance commissioning of a commercial facility “with an estimated annual production of 50 tons of rare earth oxides,” according to the release.
With the relaunch of the demonstration plant, REEcycle would use its proprietary methods to recover more than 98% of the rare earth elements essential to neodymium iron boron magnets, according to DOD.
That proprietary process starts with discarded magnets from electronic waste -- including but not limited to hard disk drives, wind turbine motors, electronic vehicle and bike motors, according to REEcycle’s website.
“With our low-cost, low waste recycling process, we are creating a new source of rare earth supply with the same sustainable focus of the technologies they make possible,” REEcycle says.
The commissioning of the commercial plant would then allow REEcycle to position itself as a supplier to “companies engaged in downstream metallization and magnet manufacturing,” according to the release.
“By enabling REEcycle to recover critical materials from electronic waste,” Anthony Di Stasio, director of the Manufacturing Capability Expansion and Investment Prioritization directorate, said, “this award will support the DOD’s work to expand the supply of rare earths needed for the production of defense articles.”
It’s the latest of six awards made through the Defense Production Act Purchases Office, which total $295.9 million since the start of fiscal year 2025, DOD said.
The announcement comes nearly a week after Deputy Administrator for the Defense Logistics Agency’s Strategic Minerals Office Theresa Leland discussed her team’s efforts to recycle critical materials such as rare earth minerals.
Among those key materials her office has found “fairly accessible to remove from end-of-life products,” Leland said during a panel discussion hosted by the Naval War College, is germanium.
Germanium is a rare mineral possessing a wide array of military applications -- one of many the Chinese Commerce Ministry banned the export of to the United States in a December announcement.
