Italy will be the first European country to have a facility for recovering rare earth elements: it will be built in Ceccano, in central Italy
Italy is about to become home to the first European facility for recovering rare earth elements from discarded hard drives and electric motors, in order to reuse them rather than mining new ones. The Ministry of Environment and Energy Security recently gave the green light to the project, called Life Inspiree, which will be built in Ceccano, in the province of Frosinone, at the facility of the company Itelyum, the lead partner of the project alongside several others.
This is a potentially crucial project for the recovery of rare earth elements, a group of chemical elements essential for building electric motors, wind turbine blades, smartphones and computers — most importantly because Europe produces almost none of them: it imports nearly all of them from abroad, mainly from China, exposing the continent to a dangerous dependence on foreign actors that are often in competition with the EU. For this reason, the European Union has decided to focus on recycling: the target, set by a 2024 European regulation, is to recover at least a quarter of the annual demand for these materials through recycling by 2030.
Specifically, these are 17 chemical elements that are fundamental to industry and technology. Despite their name, they are relatively abundant in the Earth's crust, but they occur in very diluted concentrations in nature and require complex and costly extraction processes. The full list includes Scandium, Yttrium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Promethium, Samarium, Europium, Gadolinium, Terbium, Dysprosium, Holmium, Erbium, Thulium, Ytterbium and Lutetium. The Italian project is part of a list of 47 initiatives selected by the European Commission as priorities for reducing dependence on foreign sources. Of these, only four are located in Italy and all concern recycling: Inspiree is one of them.
The idea behind the project is straightforward: end-of-life hard drives and electric motors contain powerful magnets that hold rare earth elements. The first step is to dismantle these magnets from the discarded devices. The second is to treat them chemically to separate the rare earth elements and transform them into materials that can be sold and reused by industry.
The work is coordinated by Itelyum, the company that will manage the facility. Working alongside it, as mentioned, are four other partners: Glob Eco, which is responsible for dismantling the magnets from old devices; Erion, the consortium that manages the collection of electronic waste in Italy, which will also focus on maximising magnet collection; the University of L'Aquila, which oversees the technical aspects and monitors the project's environmental and social impact; and EIT RawMaterials, a European organisation that will leverage its network of contacts to disseminate the project's results. The work builds on the experience gained from a smaller pilot facility called New-RE, previously developed by the same group of partners.
For Deputy Minister of the Environment, Vannia Gava, this authorisation marks an important step: "Securing the supply of critical raw materials today means strengthening our industrial, energy and technological autonomy," she stated, underlining that the recovery of rare earth elements from electronic waste is "an environmental challenge, but also an industrial policy choice." In 2023, an enormous rare earth deposit was discovered in Sweden — the largest ever found in Europe — which could prove fundamental in breaking China's near-total monopoly over these extraordinarily valuable resources. But that alone is not enough to guarantee the European Union's self-sufficiency.
This is why the conclusions of the 2021 Cewaste report — a two-year project funded by the EU as part of its Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme — remain as relevant as ever, having called for stricter recycling rules and argued that recycling should be made mandatory, particularly for the key raw materials used in printed circuit boards, electric vehicles and fluorescent lamps.
