SEATTLE (Recycling Monster): Cyclic Materials- the Ontario, Canada-based rare earth minerals recycling company has received funding from Microsoft’s Climate Innovation Fund towards development of its technology to recover rare earth metals from end-of-life hard drives. It must be noted that the company has been working on its CC360 technology for the past two years now.

The technology will help IT asset disposition (ITAD) companies to separate magnets from hard drive, which are then processed by Cyclic to recover valuable rare earth minerals. The remaining portion of the hard drive are processed through normal ITAD processes.

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The traditional hard drive processing technique uses data destruction, followed by shredding, in order to recover metals such as gold and silver. This technique does not recover rare earth metals. The technology used by Cyclic, which has been tested at ITAD companies such as Sims Lifecycle Services, could become useful to large data center operators including Microsoft, it noted.

Brandon Middaugh, senior director of the Climate Innovation Fund noted that the investment will support the creation of a sustainable supply of rare earth minerals, which are predicted to see huge demand growth over the coming years.