Recyclers turn to retired wind turbines for rare earths

Paladin EnviroTech taps Iowa venture’s leaching technique to reclaim metals

Paladin EnviroTech, a recycling company eyeing a new role as a supplier of rare-earth metals, has identified old wind turbines as its top target, The Wall Street Journal reported. The generators on those machines can be the size of a room and can house huge rare-earth magnets.

The company’s focus lands as the United States aims to become less reliant on China for rare earths that go into everything from drones to MRI scanners. Against that backdrop, a new type of venture is looking to the scrapyard for supply.

The supply Paladin is chasing is a product of the wind industry’s own age. There are thousands of retirement-age turbines waiting to be harvested as America’s wind industry ages, according to the Journal’s Ed Ballard. Only a fraction of earlier models contain rare earths, but the metals became commonplace in the more-powerful turbines that are now starting to be replaced.

Metal recyclers — primarily targeting copper — have been harvesting what they can. The rare-earth metals, which are harder to separate and less valuable, were going to waste.

One major hurdle lies in the economical separation of materials: isolating them, grinding them up and converting rare earth elements into metal for next-generation magnets.

Paladin collaborates with Critical Materials Recycling, a Boone, Iowa-based venture scaling a leaching technique pioneered at Ames National Laboratory to reclaim virtually all rare earths from electronic waste.

The rare-earth item appeared in The Future of Everything, the Journal’s newsletter on how innovation and technology are transforming the way people live, work and play. The edition also reported that an Anduril-backed venture has a plan to engineer super dogs for the battlefield, with the new startup wanting to genetically modify dogs to make them run faster, have a keener sense of smell and avoid common genetic conditions.

Separately, mini power plants are aiming to make green fuel using the air around them. Companies are betting they can streamline production and bring down the cost of green fuel by doing everything under one roof, in a self-contained system that runs on renewable power.

The newsletter also pointed readers to a video outside Elon Musk’s massive Colossus 2 data center. The Journal’s Christopher Mims stopped at a big revenue-generating SpaceX data center outside of Memphis and talked to a local activist about the community’s concerns around it.

The edition also noted that last week’s newsletter reported on the high-tech fight to save salmon, and that readers shared their thoughts about how other food sources or farm crops could be better protected through technology. The responses were condensed and edited, the newsletter said.