Data mining? Old servers could become new source of rare earths

​The retirement of old server equipment from data center facilities could become an opportunity for enterprises to generate revenue, instead of being an often costly recycling expense.

Last year Western Digital announced it was experimenting with new ways to extract valuable rare earth elements and metals from obsolete servers from Microsoft’s US data centers, as part of a collaboration with Critical Materials Recycling and PedalPoint Recycling.

And on Thursday, Reuters reported that Korea Zinc, which it described as one of the world’s largest smelters, is in “talks with major US technology firms to recycle data center waste and extract rare earth.”

The move comes almost one year to the day after China announced immediate export controls on seven more rare earth elements critical to enterprise IT hardware manufacturing. The new controls issued by China’s State Council required export licenses for samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium, along with their alloys, oxides, and compounds. All those materials are deemed essential components in data center storage systems, networking equipment and semiconductors.

According to Reuters, the Korea Zinc initiative will give the US another rare earth source beyond its main supplier, China, which produces about 90% of the world’s rare earths, and the single US-based mine run by MP Materials,

Sanchit Vir Gogia, chief analyst at Greyhound Research, said that the Korea Zinc initiative reflects a structural shift that is beginning to take shape inside the global technology infrastructure economy.

For decades, he said, “the retirement of data center equipment was treated almost entirely as a compliance and disposal issue. Enterprises focused on secure decommissioning, certified recycling, and documented destruction of sensitive hardware. Once equipment left production environments, its economic life was assumed to be largely finished.”

That assumption, he pointed out, “is beginning to change, because the hardware inside modern data centres contains a wide range of strategically important materials. Servers, storage systems, networking equipment, and power components contain copper, aluminum, silver, gold, and increasingly small but significant quantities of rare earth elements and other critical minerals.”

These materials play a vital role in the manufacturing of semiconductors, energy systems, defense electronics, and advanced computing infrastructure, he explained, noting, “as global demand for digital infrastructure continues to expand, the volume of retired hardware entering disposal channels is rising quickly.”

Electronic waste has already become one of the fastest growing waste streams in the world. “Global volumes now exceed 60 million tonnes annually and are projected to move toward eighty million tonnes by the end of the decade if current trends continue,” he said. “Data center infrastructure represents only a portion of that total, but it is a particularly important portion because it is concentrated, professionally managed, and replaced in structured cycles.”

For a metals producer, he said, data center infrastructure represents a highly attractive feedstock, because unlike consumer electronics, enterprise hardware is replaced in large batches and flows through professional asset management channels.

That predictability, said Gogia, “allows recyclers to design specialized processes that target specific components and materials. Over time, this creates the foundation for an industrial scale circular supply chain in which retired electronics feed back into the production of new materials.”

For enterprises themselves, he added, “the implications are primarily economic and operational rather than geopolitical. The ability to capture value from retired hardware depends heavily on how organizations manage the end of life phase of their infrastructure lifecycle. Many companies still treat hardware retirement as a simple disposal exercise. Mixed equipment is often shipped to recyclers with little separation between different component types. In those scenarios most of the recoverable value disappears.”

Organizations that approach decommissioning more strategically can improve outcomes significantly, said Gogia, pointing out that separating storage devices, circuit boards, and power components allows recyclers to process materials more efficiently, and maintaining detailed chain of custody records ensures that the hardware is tracked securely, which is often a compliance requirement, while still enabling recovery of valuable materials.

Data centers have traditionally been viewed as energy intensive facilities that consume enormous resources, but, he said, “what is becoming visible now is that they also generate a growing stream of recoverable materials when equipment reaches the end of its operational life. As computing infrastructure continues to expand globally, those retirement streams will begin to resemble industrial resource flows rather than simple waste.”

This article originally appeared on NetworkWorld. Read More