Regenx is extending its hydrometallurgical platform beyond platinum group metals to neodymium and praseodymium, recovered from the permanent magnets inside end-of-life electronics and industrial equipment. The work is at laboratory scale, and the results are ours to prove.
Rare earth elements sit inside almost every technology that defines the modern economy: wind turbines, generators, hard drives, medical imaging, electric vehicles, aerospace and defense systems. There is no substitute for what they do.
Global production is heavily concentrated, and China holds the leading position in processing capacity. Meanwhile, neodymium-iron-boron magnets — roughly 22 to 31 percent neodymium by mass — are sitting in electronic waste and end-of-life equipment across North America: already mined, already refined, already here.
Regenx’s position is straightforward: the fastest domestic rare earth supply is the one that has already been paid for once.
The same neodymium-iron-boron magnets turn up wherever strong permanent magnets are used: inside end-of-life electronics, including computer hard drives, and inside larger industrial generators such as MRI machines and wind turbines. Wherever they come from, they are the same class of material — rare earth magnets that have already been mined and refined once.
Regenx’s research began with the most accessible of these: the small neodymium magnet in the actuator arm of an end-of-life hard drive. The team harvested those magnets and treated them as ore.
It is not a trivial feedstock. Magnets can be recovered from e-waste readily enough at laboratory scale; doing it at industrial volume is a genuinely different problem, and securing consistent supply is one of the central challenges facing every rare earth recycler. Regenx treats that as an engineering problem to be solved, not one to be glossed over.
Recovery is not the same as grade. The two are easy to confuse, so the page states the difference plainly. Recovery (~99.5%) is the share of the target metal the process captures. Grade is the share of the final solid concentrate made up of a given element. A moderate grade does not mean low recovery: the process captures almost all of the target metal, then concentrates it into the product forms below.
Recovery into solution
Across the hydrometallurgical routes tested, Regenx consistently brought about 99.5% of the neodymium and praseodymium out of the magnet feedstock and into solution under optimized conditions — the strongest, most consistently reproduced figure in the research.
Four product forms — each a further step along the purification path:
RE oxalate
The simplest to produce, but it carries iron contamination — and there is currently no known chemistry that removes iron oxalate selectively.
RE double-salt
Materially cleaner than the oxalate, bringing iron down to roughly half a percent. Where product purity matters, this is the stronger of the two direct products.
RE hydroxide
An optional conversion of the double-salt, one step further refined. A conversion product, not a required stage.
RE oxide
The most refined form, produced by converting the hydroxide — or the oxalate directly. Also an optional conversion product.
Composition of the recovered concentrate (ICP-OES, laboratory results)
Product form
Nd (%)
Pr (%)
Fe (%)
Oxalate route
70.3
9.6
6.6
Double-salt, route A
76.1
7.8
0.4
Double-salt, route B
72.7
11.4
0.5
Double-salt, route C
59.6
8.4
0.4
Each figure is the share of that product made up by the element — a composition, not a recovery rate. Grades are ICP-OES analyses of final precipitation products produced in Regenx’s laboratory from accumulated process solution. They describe specific test products at laboratory scale, not a product specification.
Known limitation, iron. The oxalate route carries iron that cannot currently be removed selectively; the double-salt routes produce materially cleaner product. Regenx states this plainly because any competent reviewer of the chemistry would ask.
Regenx operates its own mineral processing laboratory in the Greater Vancouver area, equipped with OES-ICP and XRF analytical instruments capable of performing comprehensive analyses.All product grades presented on this page were generated in that laboratory by ICP-OES.
The rare earth research program was carried out by Regenx’s technical team:
Director of R&D
past contributor
This is laboratory-stage work. The research has demonstrated that Regenx’s existing hydrometallurgical infrastructure can be adapted to recover rare earths from NdFeB magnets, and it has identified the operating conditions that work. It has not yet been run at commercial scale, and the company is not representing that it has.
The next phase of work is defined: optimizing feed size and reagent consumption, controlling impurities, extending recovery to dysprosium and terbium, and establishing feedstock supply at volume.
Regenx is publishing this because the results stand on their own at the stage they are at.