A recent Euronews article, produced by the European Science Communication Institute (ESCI), examined several everyday products that Europe still struggles to recycle. One of the central challenges highlighted was the lack of a European recycling pathway for neodymium permanent magnets, a topic at the core of our work in HARMONY.
Neodymium magnets power the clean-tech transition: they are used in electric motors, wind turbines, robotics, and e-mobility devices. Yet today, Europe has no industrial process to recover the rare earth elements contained in these magnets at scale. As demand rises and supply remains concentrated in geopolitically sensitive regions, this gap creates strategic, economic, and environmental risks.
In the Euronews piece, our team member Lorenzo Berzi (University of Florence) explains why magnet recycling is so difficult: their strength and composition require specialised, safe dismantling and carefully controlled processing. This is exactly the challenge HARMONY is addressing.
What HARMONY contributes
Our project is developing solutions across the entire value chain:
Smarter collection of end-of-life motors, wind turbine components, and e-mobility devices
Assisted dismantling to safely access embedded magnets
Material recovery processes to extract rare earths
Pathways toward new high-performance recycled magnets
Our goal is to support the emergence of a European magnet recycling industry that strengthens supply resilience and reduces environmental impact.
As Lorenzo notes in the article, demand for these materials will only grow. Europe will need recycling capacity and HARMONY is helping build it.
To read the full article and gain deeper insights into the future of magnet recycling, visit Euronews here.
Also featured: other EU initiatives tackling hard-to-recycle waste streams
The Euronews article also presents several EU projects working on different, equally challenging materials:
Everglass — Laser-based recycling for technical and medical glass
LANDFEED — Turning food waste from restaurants into bio-based fertilisers
Diaper Recycling Europe — Pilot systems for recycling disposable nappies
Re-Cig — Transforming collected cigarette butts into reusable cellulose acetate
These projects, together with HARMONY, show how European innovation is advancing circular solutions for materials once thought “unrecyclable.”