A facility for separating and recycling rare earth magnets has been launched at the University of Birmingham, which was opened on 15 January by Chris McDonald MP, Minister for Industry in the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero and the Department for Business and Trade. The new facility uses an innovative hydrogen-based process for rare earth magnet recycling, which was developed at the university.
Rare earth magnets are amongst the ‘critical minerals’ possessing strategic importance in many modern industries. They form a core building block in technologies such as wind turbines, electric vehicles, and pumps.
Situated in Tyseley Energy Park in Birmingham, the rare earth magnet recycling facility uses a process called Hydrogen Processing of Magnet Scrap (HPMS) technology, said to be an extremely efficient method to extract rare earth magnets from end-of-life products without the need to fully disassemble them.
The waste is turned into a sustainable source of rare earths that can be used to manufacture new metals, alloys and magnets – with favourable repercussions for environmental impact, cost and supply chain risk.
Minister for Industry Chris McDonald MP said: “This new facility is great news for the West Midlands which will help create hundreds of well-paid local jobs and is testament to our world-leading expertise in rare earth recycling.”
The facility reportedly scales the process to commercial production levels. A previous proof-of-concept facility handled batches of 50-100kg size while the new facility can recover over 400kg of rare earth alloy per batch. It turns the material into new sintered magnets at 100 tonne capacity per year on a single shift and over 300 tonnes on multiple shifts. The group says magnets can be produced at a fraction of the environmental impact and cost compared to primary production methods.
The processing facility re-introduces sintered rare earth magnet production back into the UK for the first time in 25 years and this can be used in primary production of magnets and in producing them from recycled feeds.
By recycling products such as hard drives, electric motors, wind turbines, robotic actuators, pumps, filters, and electronics, this also delivers a CO2 saving of around 90% compared to producing magnets from minerals extracted from the ground, according to the group.
In November 2025, the UK Government published its updated ‘Vision 2035: Critical Minerals Strategy’ setting out how the UK will increase resilience in this strategic sector. The Birmingham recycling facility aims to address the strategy’s goals and is a stepping stone to a larger scale facility being developed on the site.
Minister for Industry Chris McDonald MP said: “This new facility is great news for the West Midlands which will help create hundreds of well-paid local jobs and is testament to our world-leading expertise in rare earth recycling.”
“This is our Critical Minerals Strategy in action, bringing sintered magnet manufacturing back to the UK for the first time in 25 years and backing innovative projects to boost our critical minerals supply chains and power the green industries of the future.”
The new facility has received £4.5 million funding from Innovate UK’s Driving the Electric Industrialisation Centres (DER-IC) with supporting grants via the Innovate Climates Programme, EPSRC, the Advanced Propulsion Centre, and EU Horizon grants. This investment supported the UK’s push towards a net zero carbon economy and contributes to the development of clean technology supply chains.
Bruce Adderley from Innovate UK, said: “Through the realisation of this magnet recycling facility, the UK now has all the constituent parts of a rare earth permanent magnet supply chain for the first time in over two decades. As an open access facility this provides UK industry the opportunity to access the skills and expertise, from the University of Birmingham team to scale and commercialise this innovate recycling process.
“This is a fantastic example of research to industry knowledge transfer and has the potential to de-risk the supply of rare earth permanent magnets to the UKs manufacturing industry and make these crucial components more sustainable.”
Recycling technologies developed by the university’s Magnetic Materials Group have been exclusively licensed to Hypromag, which is now 100% owned by Maginito, a subsidiary of AIM/TSXV-listed Mkango Resources.
Read more about the announcement here.
