Cyclic Materials announces plans for South Carolina campus

Rare earth elements recycler Cyclic Materials, headquartered in Toronto, has announced an $82 million investment to establish a rare earth recycling campus in the Alligator Industrial Park in McBee, South Carolina. The new site will create more than 90 jobs and host Cyclic Materials’ second U.S. spoke facility and the company’s largest hub facility to date, capable of processing 2,000 metric tons of magnet material, with a planned expansion to 6,000 metric tons per year, Cyclic Materials says.

The South Carolina project also will be supported by a range of federal and state incentives. South Carolina’s Coordinating Council for Economic Development approved job development credits related to the project and awarded a $500,000 Set-Aside grant to Chesterfield County to assist with the costs of building improvements.

The combined spoke-and-hub facility, with operations expected to begin in 2028, will use Cyclic Materials’ proprietary MagCycle and REEPure processes to separate and recover mixed rare earth oxides (MREO) as well as copper, steel and aluminum, from end-of-life products. This will enable a resilient, North American-anchored source of REEs, the company says. These materials are critical to the production of vehicles, advanced electronics, artificial intelligence infrastructure and high-performance permanent magnets used in defense, wind turbines and advanced manufacturing systems. 

Earlier in January, the company announced that it closed a $75 million Series C equity round—its largest to date—bringing its total equity funding to more than $162 million and enabling it to scale up operations across the United States and Europe and accelerate its Canada-based research and development footprint.

“With this new capital, we can rapidly deploy rare earths recycling infrastructure where it’s needed most, delivering local, secure supply at a pace traditional mining simply cannot match,” Cyclic Materials founder and CEO Ahmad Ghahrema says in the news release announcing the funding. “Cyclic Materials is now ideally positioned to help restore North American global leadership in rare earth resources powering advanced manufacturing.”

Photo courtesy of Cyclic Materials

The South Carolina site initially will have the capacity to produce 600 metric tons of MREO annually, with a planned expansion to 1,800 metric tons to meet growing demand. Deploying such a facility will enable Cyclic Materials to onshore the production of these critical materials, particularly much-needed heavy rare earth elements (REEs). The expected 1,800 metric tons of MREO produced by the campus annually would supply REEs equivalent to the material needed in producing 6 million hybrid transmissions per year, according to the company.

In late 2025, Cyclic Materials announced an agreement with Vacuumschmelze (Vac), a global leader in magnetic materials and solutions. Under a 10-year exclusive agreement, Cyclic Materials will recycle all of the company’s magnet production byproducts (swarf) generated at Vac’s new manufacturing facility in nearby Sumter, South Carolina, which began operations at the end of 2025.

“Announcing the opening of our second U.S. recycling site in South Carolina is a major milestone and a clear signal of our long-term commitment to building resilient, domestic critical minerals infrastructure in the U.S.,” Ghahreman says. “This facility will enable Cyclic to reliably serve partners such as Vac while scaling our advanced recycling technologies that support manufacturing, create a secure supply chain for the most critical rare earth elements, reduce reliance on overseas supply chains [and] recirculate rare earths back to our domestic partners, ultimately delivering valuable economic benefit and environmental value.”

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster says, “Cyclic Materials’ new facility in Chesterfield County reflects the confidence companies have in South Carolina’s workforce and our ability to support advanced manufacturing. This over $82 million investment will bring jobs to the community and strengthen the local economy.”

Mesa, Arizona hosts Cyclic Materials' first commercial-scale spoke facility, and Kingston, Ontario, hosts the company's Centre of Excellence, which has an R&D facility and its hub hydrometallurgical site.