Can You Recycle a Hard Drive? Google is Quietly Trying To Find Out (grist.org) 47
Rare earth magnet recycling is about so much more than sustainable data centers. From a report: The U.S. alone generates nearly 17 percent of all used hard disk drives -- the largest share globally -- and researchers have estimated that if all of these data storage devices were recycled, they could supply more than 5 percent of all rare earth magnet demand outside of China, potentially helping meet the demand of the information technology sector as well as clean energy companies. A consortium of U.S. researchers, tech companies, hardware manufacturers, and electronic waste recyclers has recently begun exploring exactly how those rare earths can be re-harvested and given a second life.
In 2019, these stakeholders published a report identifying a host of potential strategies, including wiping and re-using entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing the magnet assemblies, grinding up old hard drive magnets and using the powder to manufacture new ones, and extracting purified rare earth elements from shredded drives. Each of these strategies has its own challenges -- removing magnet assemblies by hand is labor intensive; extracting rare earths from technology can be chemical or energy intensive and produce significant waste -- and for any of them to be scaled up, there needs to be buy-in from numerous actors across global supply chains.
Making even the relatively minor supply chain adjustments needed to place used or recycled rare earth magnets inside new drives "is difficult," said Hongyue Jin, a scientist at the University of Arizona who studies rare earth recycling. "And especially when you've got to start from some small amount with a new technology." Still, some companies have begun taking the first steps. In 2018, Google, hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate, and electronics refurbisher Recontext (formerly Teleplan) conducted a small demonstration project that involved removing the magnet assemblies from six hard disk drives and placing them in new Seagate drives. This demonstration, said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University, was the "catalyst" for the larger 2019 study in which 6,100 magnet assemblies were extracted from Seagate hard drives in a Google data center before being inserted into new hard drives in a Seagate manufacturing facility. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes it is the largest demonstration of its kind ever done.
The results, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, not only showed that rare earth magnets could be harvested and reused at larger scale, but that there were significant environmental benefits to doing so: Overall, re-used magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones, according to the study. Frost says that this estimate conservatively took into account the energy mix of the local power grid where the data center operated. Considering Google's near round-the-clock renewable energy usage at this particular data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even lower.
In 2019, these stakeholders published a report identifying a host of potential strategies, including wiping and re-using entire hard disk drives, removing and reusing the magnet assemblies, grinding up old hard drive magnets and using the powder to manufacture new ones, and extracting purified rare earth elements from shredded drives. Each of these strategies has its own challenges -- removing magnet assemblies by hand is labor intensive; extracting rare earths from technology can be chemical or energy intensive and produce significant waste -- and for any of them to be scaled up, there needs to be buy-in from numerous actors across global supply chains.
Making even the relatively minor supply chain adjustments needed to place used or recycled rare earth magnets inside new drives "is difficult," said Hongyue Jin, a scientist at the University of Arizona who studies rare earth recycling. "And especially when you've got to start from some small amount with a new technology." Still, some companies have begun taking the first steps. In 2018, Google, hard disk drive manufacturer Seagate, and electronics refurbisher Recontext (formerly Teleplan) conducted a small demonstration project that involved removing the magnet assemblies from six hard disk drives and placing them in new Seagate drives. This demonstration, said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University, was the "catalyst" for the larger 2019 study in which 6,100 magnet assemblies were extracted from Seagate hard drives in a Google data center before being inserted into new hard drives in a Seagate manufacturing facility. Frost, who led the 2019 study, believes it is the largest demonstration of its kind ever done.
The results, which will be published in a forthcoming edition of the journal Resources, Conservation, and Recycling, not only showed that rare earth magnets could be harvested and reused at larger scale, but that there were significant environmental benefits to doing so: Overall, re-used magnet assemblies had a carbon footprint 86 percent lower than new ones, according to the study. Frost says that this estimate conservatively took into account the energy mix of the local power grid where the data center operated. Considering Google's near round-the-clock renewable energy usage at this particular data center, the carbon footprint of the reused magnets was even lower.
yes, if you pay (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:yes, if you pay (Score:5, Informative)
Manufacturing is no different. It’s more expensive to clean, separate, remove impurities, then just to dig more out of the ground. It’s very labor intensive, and where does labor cost more? in the US. That’s an economic fact. Democrats are trying to incentivize with “carbon credits”. The credits are an attempt to balance the costs. BTW, ALL of Tesla’s profit is due to carbon credits, not selling cars. ( https://insideevs.com/news/438... [insideevs.com] )
Additionally, since china no longer buys US garbage, virtually ZERO is "recycled" and most ends up in land fills even you stupidly use multiple containers. ( https://www.theguardian.com/us... [theguardian.com] ) . *sigh* . Now who’s stupid.
Re: (Score:2)
Undisputable fact: Capitalism is the current leading economic system . The goal of capitalism is to increase owner equity. Period. Its why millions of jobs have left the US to lower wage areas.
out of curiousity, do these exploited workers then go back to their high paying jobs they had before capitalism came in and made them work for those low wages?
I mean they must have had a much higher standard of living before, right?
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Once the sock factory is built, nobody is going to pay a week's wages for hand-knitted socks, it doesn't matter how much more comfortable they are.
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Once the sock factory is built, nobody is going to pay a week's wages for hand-knitted socks, it doesn't matter how much more comfortable they are.
I guess my comment was more addressing whether or not the people working in one of the new factories assembling smartphones were having a higher standard of living than they had before the factories came in.
What did they do before? Most likely subsistence farming.
So the issue isn't as simple as branding capitalism as evil and stomping on the poor cheap labor and destroying their lives.
Do the people who are wringing their hands about the poor exploited workers believe that thy should lose their jobs an
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Once the sock factory is built, nobody is going to pay a week's wages for hand-knitted socks, it doesn't matter how much more comfortable they are.
I guess my comment was more addressing whether or not the people working in one of the new factories assembling smartphones were having a higher standard of living than they had before the factories came in.
What did they do before? Most likely subsistence farming.
I had imagined a more intelligent, educated conversation than that. But this is slashdot.
(Hint: very few people with land to farm are subsistence farmers)
Re: (Score:2)
I had imagined a more intelligent, educated conversation than that. But this is slashdot.
(Hint: very few people with land to farm are subsistence farmers)
It is a question worth asking - although some won't like the question. I take it your claiming it is stupid indicates your dislike
Let's just assume that these people are working at the factory assembling Smartphones.
What did they do before they took that work?
Now that they left that work, do they have a better standard of living?
If no, can they go back to that work they did before?
This also has to be defined in what your objection to that factory is.
Is it protectionism, the desire to have the fact
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What you don't realize is that unlike my example of a sock knitter being displaced by a sock factory, assembling smartphones doesn't displace anything.
And assembling smartphones isn't something Capitalism brought. Nobody's country switched to Capitalism, so now they have smartphone factories. Never happened. There isn't even one example of that in the world.
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What you don't realize is that unlike my example of a sock knitter being displaced by a sock factory, assembling smartphones doesn't displace anything.
And assembling smartphones isn't something Capitalism brought. Nobody's country switched to Capitalism, so now they have smartphone factories. Never happened. There isn't even one example of that in the world.
Something askew here, as if these people didn't exist before smartphones. You figure the Chinese or other nations just went abracadabra, and the workers showed up? They were created out of thin air to assemble smartphones or whatever jerbs that the underdeveloped countries created?
It ain't about anyone being displaced, homie, just that there was a reason they stopped what they were doing and took that jerb.
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Depends how you define "leading" I guess. In terms of quality of life, equality, or happiness there are better systems deployed in Europe.
Re:yes, if you pay (Score:5, Interesting)
"It's just more expensive then pulling the element out of the dirt. Since it costs less to just throw it away"
I'm guessing this is the case if a lot of the environmental costs are not accounted for, or wages are keep unreasonably low through market segmentation (open movement of wealth, and closed movement of labor, across borders).
"since the US is a Capitalist based society, our pocketbooks dictate we just toss it"
Capitalist, in the sense that those with more capital have more power to control the market and what gets commoditized and what does not?
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See that is the rub, it requires economies of scale to recycle properly. All the waste, you consider dirt, not pieces to be recycled, just dirt to be mined and you treat it as such. Grind all that shite up to a fine power and feed it to a process line, where it goes through a series of refinement processes to extract desired molecules and break down undesired molecules into more desired molecules. Nothing left over but fertiliser, safe fertiliser, even heavy metals have worth, but it requires economy of sca
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Except I don't think hard drives are something that are uneconomical to recycle. The cases are typically steel which is remarkably recyclable, so much so that scrap steel is recycled as well as it has value.
The platters are typically aluminum coated with some form of iron oxide. The magnets contain rare earths so they're extremely valuable.
The problem isn't recycling hard drives, it's the data contained on the drives. Destroying that data usually degrades the value of the recycling - if you shoot it up, the
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What kind of mish-mash of 40 year old obsolete information and urban legends is this?
Who let Granddaddy use the AOL again?
The cases are typically steel
Um, no?
The platters are typically aluminum coated with some form of iron oxide.
Uh, no? Not since the early 1990s?
The magnets contain rare earths so they're extremely valuable.
Uh, no? They're called "rare", but they aren't that rare. The platinum in catalytic converters is far more valuable, yet platinum isn't a rare Earth.
Destroying that data usually degrades the value of the recycling - if you shoot it up, the lead gets everywhere
What kind of psycho redneck nonsense is this? You think people drag their steel hard disks out behind the iron-oxide-red barn to shoot the drive like Old Yeller?
You can't be for real. As a comedian, g
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Not only our pocketbooks, but also convenience.
Here, in my city, we cannot use the city services for recycling 90% of otherwise perfectly recyclable content. No packing foam (okay, they make a mess), no plastic toys, no glass (except containers), no metals (except cans), no electronics, and definitely no plastics bags. And it does not matter whether these have the "recycle" symbols on them (most of them do), they will just not pick those up.
So, you have an old server? They will not pick it up. You'll have t
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You can recycle anything. It's just more expensive then pulling the element out of the dirt. Since it costs less to just throw it away, and since the US is a Capitalist based society, our pocketbooks dictate we just toss it.
Throwing stuff away costs less than recycling, when someone else pays for cleaning up the waste. One of the problems of capitalism is that cost/benefit optimisation tends to be localised to individual corporations, whereas many actual costs and benefits have society-wide scale. For example, we know that plastic waste is a severe environmental problem, that could be very costly to fix, but the plastic producers and users do not incur these costs. Because of that, it currently does not pay to recycle plastic
Re: (Score:2)
The problem is when government influence becomes a commodity.
At that point you get to hijack the economic process itself and it becomes politics.
It's like winning a boxing match by taking the referee hostage.
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The problem is when government influence becomes a commodity.
That is indeed a problem where politicians are just guns for hire to corporate sponsors, which seems to be a common model in the USA. Not all democracies are run like that, though. In some places, politicians gain their positions and retain them, because they act to represent the majority of voters. In the UK, there is a concern about sleaze in politics, where chums of politicians get favoured treatment in terms of lucrative government contracts, and certain corporations get favoured lobbying access to min
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It's often not worth recycling "finished" products, because of the energy intensity required to break it down. Never mind the labor.
We should be aiming to reuse first. And with magnets that's probably a bad idea since magnets lose their magnetism from being handled poorly, and the smaller ones break pretty easily (like those in 2.5" and 3.5" drives.)
Still, recovering the materials used to make them is probably pretty straight forward, remove the head assembly, place it in a vice, twist, and you either break
I scrap drives all the time (Score:5, Informative)
I frequently scrap hard drives for metal recovery. The controller boards have a lot of precious metal on them, so I sell them to a company called Boardsort (http://www.boardsort.com). The rest of the drive is mostly aluminum, so that ends up going to the scrap yard. The outer shell is cast aluminum. The platters are either aluminum or glass with the chrome plating with trace amounts of precious metals. The read/write head has a copper or copper plated winding on it, so I toss it with my electric motors along with the drive spindle. The magnets inside I may keep or give to someone who I know collects them.
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Sounds like bullshit, the amount of material is so small for a modern drive, and older drives are worth far more selling to vintage enthusiasts on eBay.
How much "lot of precious metals" can you find on a PCB about 4 inches square? Bullshit.
How much copper can you find on a magnetoresistive head with a write winding that may contain micrograms of copper?
Complete nonsense, Cecil.
Re:I scrap drives all the time (Score:5, Interesting)
I used to work at a gold mine with a heap leach. Anything over 0.04 Troy oz/ton was profitable. At the time gold was going for $400 an ounce. It doesn't take much.
The rare earth magnets can be dissolved in acid, then the elements separated by solvent extraction. The problem is one of scale, do you have a hundred tons a day to feed a recycling plant? I suspect not. Those economics are more dubious.
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I used to work at a gold mine with a heap leach. Anything over 0.04 Troy oz/ton was profitable.
I recall reading about a massive pollution incident when cyanide was used to leach gold from mine tailings in Romania. The lagoon wall broke, and the cyanide sludge went into the nearest river, which ended up in the Danube, killing all the fish, and a lot of other wildlife. Luckily, cyanide is not a cumulative poison, so the rivers recovered fairly quickly.
I am not sure of the chemistry needed to extract rare earth metals from waste, compared to the chemistry needed to extract from ores. As I understand it,
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I actually save them (Score:1)
I reckon some day I'll remove every screw I ca
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I "scrub" them first. (Score:2)
"badblocks" in Linux does a nice multiple pass write / read that is very easy for the CPU to do while it does things I want in the foreground. I do this after the first couple of the backups of the, as you put it, "old drive" directory tree. I was hoping to find a good link in this discussion, since I have 30+ plus drives: 44-pin and 40-pin IDE, SCSI of various flavors, and SATA of various performance specs.
SSD's vs HDD's (Score:3)
SSD's don't have the magnets that HDD's have.
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Re: (Score:2)
I got sidetracked... (Score:2)
...thinking about the choice of the word 'quietly'
is this only because they didn't put out a press release? or maybe they're trying to pull a fast one and wanna keep it on dl
remove the word on of its two occurences and does the meaning/info change?
and yes, I am trying to look busy right now
Re: (Score:2)
...thinking about the choice of the word 'quietly'
is this only because they didn't put out a press release? or maybe they're trying to pull a fast one and wanna keep it on dl
remove the word on of its two occurences and does the meaning/info change?
and yes, I am trying to look busy right now
It's just lazy headline writing.
Spinning Rust (Score:2)
Just how does the user's energy use affect CO2 use (Score:2)
A hard drive at a google data center is going to cause X amount of fuel to burnt if it was recycled or not.
It doesn't matter where it was taken from or where it goes to, there will be a hard drive there and it will be using power.
A more important question is what's the MTBF of a recycled assembly as opposed to a new one.
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A more important question is what's the MTBF of a recycled assembly as opposed to a new one.
In that case, we are talking about refurbished rather than recycled drives. To me, recycling means rendering waste down to raw materials, which can be used to build new stuff. Machines can have a very long service life, if worn out parts are replaced. What I would be concerned about is that hard drives are not designed for such maintenance and refurbishment, so maybe it is not feasible. The same tends to apply to a great deal of electronic kit these days.
Mining technologies (Score:2)
Collecting all IT waste and munching it up gives a mixture better than high grade metal ores
which can then be processed by the same technologies used to extract metals from ores.
Magnets (Score:2)
I take apart my dead hard drives. Doesn't take very long with power tools and a few torx bits. I have a large collection of rare earth magnets from those drives, and they are very useful for many things, even as refrigerator magnets. Just don't bring two of them together with bare hands.