Earlier this summer, Greentec, an electronic waste and recycling center based in Cambridge, Ontario, developed a robotic cell called Project Lexi to dismantle hard drives in a matter of minutes. The company partnered with local Conestoga College, Kitchener, Ontario, to work on the development of Project Lexi the past three years. 

Greentec provides information technology asset disposition (ITAD) services and electronics recycling for customers across the U.S. and Canada. Greentec President and CEO Tony Perrotta says his company typically processes about 12,000 metric tons of electronics per year. 

He adds that Greentec usually receives about eight metric tons of hard drives per month. However, he adds that there are challenges when it comes to dismantling hard drives.

“We were using two methods to process hard drives,” he says. “Shred and separate the materials. The problems with traditional hard drives is they have rare earth magnets in them that attach to ferrous metals or screens, and you lose them. Every time you shred, no matter how clean, there’s some comingling. The other process is to take them apart by hand and disassemble them. It takes quite a bit of time to dismantle a hard drive.”

Perrotta adds that these two methods seemed to be “inefficient.” So, about three years ago, Greentec partnered with Conestoga College students to develop a robot that could perform this task better and quicker.

The result of the research is Project Lexi—a robotic cell that allows Greentec to recover all components within hard drives. Perrotta says it takes about four to five minutes to disassemble a hard drive by hand. The robotic cell can disassemble a hard drive in two minutes, and Perrotta hopes that time can decrease with additional troubleshooting. 

“Lexi allows us to recover valuable components from the drive, including rare earth magnets, aluminum casing, circuit boards and stainless-steel covers among many other materials from these hard drives,” Perrotta says. “Once the materials have been recovered, they can be reused in the creation of new hard drives or other products, including servo motors and high-efficiency energy appliances.”

Greentec plans to incorporate Project Lexi at its operations in September during a trial period to see if the technology is applicable on a larger scale. Perrotta says Greentec is patenting the robotic cell and hopes to license it for others to use in the future. 

Ongoing partnership with students

This isn’t the first time Conestoga College helped Greentec on a project. Perrotta says his company has partnered with the university on various projects since 2010. He adds that the college has a research chair dedicated to researching technologies for recycling electronic wastes. Undergraduate students, most of whom are in engineering programs, have helped research various projects for Greentec in recent years. Perrotta says the research gives students practical experience to help them before they graduate.

Perrotta says working with undergraduate students is challenging in that several students graduate each semester while the projects are still being researched. He says the turnover of students does slow down the research process. However, he adds that Greentec has been able to complete five projects to date with the college.  

“The first [project] was a sorting line, sorting different types of products, mainly for ink and toner cartridges,” Perrotta says. “Then we set up a cleaning line to clean toner cartridges—you can’t shred those since that toner dust is flammable. You need to clean them first. So, we set up a preprocess cleaning line with Conestoga College. Then after that [project] we did an optical sorter project. Then, we looked at an LCD processing robot. Then, we did Project Lexi.” 

In the future, Perrotta says Greentec wants to partner with Conestoga College on using robotics for processing other electronic devices. For the time being, he says he is most focused on making sure he can scale up Project Lexi. 

“We look forward to further exploring other devices that could be dismantled using the robotic cell process,” Perrotta says. “Products like laptops, mobile phones and tablets contain numerous high-value components that could be targeted through this robotic separation system. Our focus now is we don’t want to bite off too much. We want to get Project Lexi from 1.0 to 2.0.” 

Following its 60 anniversary Aug. 3., Bunting Magnetics Co., Newton, Kansas, has launched a rebranding effort, unifying all divisions under the name Bunting.

Previously, acquired companies retained their original names and were designated a Bunting Magnetics company. Now, each division will be described as Bunting—Newton, Bunting—Redditch and so on.

The company says the decision to rebrand was made with the goal of uniting all companies associated with the Bunting brand under one name, eliminating confusion for customers.

The University of Birmingham, United Kingdom, has been awarded $4 million euros to set up a pilot facility to reclaim rare earth metals from scrap as part of the European Union-funded Horizon 2020 project SUSMAGPRO (sustainable recovery, reprocessing and reuse of rare-earth magnets in a circular economy).

The facility will focus on recycling magnets made of neodymium, boron and iron. These magnets are found in hard disk drives, household appliances, electric vehicles and wind turbine generators and are increasingly important in the transition to a green, low-carbon economy, according to a news release announcing the pilot project.

In the last 30 years, their use has increased exponentially, and demand is expected to rise to the tens of thousands of tons by 2030.

China produces around 80 percent of the world’s rare-earth metals and currently less than 1 percent is recycled, “which means it presents an exciting circular economy opportunity,” the university says. Additionally, rare earth metals have shown significant volatility in the price in recent years. Recycling the magnets will help protect the supply chain for Europe’s manufacturing base, the news release says.

The grant will fund the development of a complete European supply chain that can produce 20 tons of recycled magnets per year that would otherwise go to landfill.  

A robotic sorting line in Sweden will locate and concentrate the rare-earth magnets from scrap at Tyseley Energy Park, Birmingham. Recycling facilities in the U.K., Germany and Sweden will extract the metal alloy powders from sorted scrap, which will then be used to manufacture recycled-content magnets in plants in the U.K., Germany and Slovenia.  

The hydrogen processing of magnet scrap process was developed by University of Birmingham and “researchers will be a key aspect of the new supply chain.”

Previous methods of extracting rare-earth metals required disassembly and removal of the magnet.  The new process uses hydrogen to break down magnetic metal alloys into a powder, which is easily separated from the remaining components. The approach saves time, labor and month and also “allows the recycling unit to process multiple items at the same time. “

“Rare-earth magnets are used in practically every application that uses electricity to produce motion, and underpin industries that are worth more than $11 trillion [euros] worldwide,” Allan Walton, professor at the School of Metallurgy and Materials and one of the inventors of the process, says in the news release. “However, both the price and supply have fluctuated considerably over recent years. This means there is considerable opportunity for cost-efficient technologies, which make recycling viable in the long-term.” 

Recent studies have indicated that magnet recycling could emulate the stainless steel market, where 25 percent of demand is met by secondary material.

Ireland-based Smurfit Kappa reports that it has seen increased interest in the number of companies seeking sustainable packaging alternatives for fresh fruit and vegetables. 

Smurfit Kappa has been working on a portfolio of products designed to replace less sustainable packaging as many brands come under increasing pressure to become more sustainable, the company reports in a news release. The packaging company released a survey recently about sustainable packaging, and 75 percent of consumers indicated a preference for paper-based packaging against less sustainable alternatives.

According to a news release from Smurfit Kappa, the company is working with companies in the agricultural sector to develop more sustainable, paper-based packaging. The company has a new packaging solution it produced for Portuguese grape producer Pomares do Sol that is an easy-to-assemble corrugated container on which high-quality color and graphics can be printed to attract consumer attention. It’s also fully recyclable and designed to ensure that the condition and quality of the fruit in the packaging remains in perfect condition from farm to consumer.

“This was the result of a collaborative process with Pomares do Sol during which we analyzed all aspects of the supply chain and the product requirements,” says Raul Andre, general manager of Smurfit Kappa Celapack. “Raising the profile of the brand was a key consideration and we also created a packaging solution that has a lifespan which matches the lifespan of the product inside which is very important.” 

In addition, Smurfit Kappa has a Better Planet Packaging initiative that was released last year that seeks to reduce packaging waste and address the challenges of waste that ends up in the oceans and landfill.