Rare Earths (RE) are crucial materials for Europe's successful green and digital transition, thus classified as highly critical. The market for RE magnets itself is relatively small - about €6.5 billion - however its downstream leverage is enormous: the mobility business in the EU27 alone is expected to grow to about €500 billion by 2030, with 6 million jobs. While being a world leader in the manufacturing of e.g. electric motors, the EU27 is fully import-dependent along the entire value chain of RE magnet materials. Despite a growing market, European magnet production capacity is underutilised and tends to serve specialised niche applications. In addition, RE magnets are increasingly imported as part of motors and generator assemblies and products. The main reasons for these developments are that China has a monopoly in the RE supply chain across all stages from mining to refining. To overcome this issue, REEsilience will categorise RE for geographic locations, quantities, chemical composition, ethical and sustainable indicators, ramp-up scenarios, and pricing, considering all value streams from virgin to secondary material. It will build a production system that ensures a resilient and sustainable supply chain for RE as critical raw materials for the e-mobility, renewable energy and further strategic sectors in Europe with less dependencies on non-European economies. A newly-developed software tool will determine optimum mixing ratios to ensure consistently high product quality with maximum secondary materials for high-tech applications. Combined with new and improved technologies for alloy production and powder preparation, especially of secondary materials, the yield and stability of processes will be further enhanced, allowing further augmentation of the proportion of secondary materials in RE PM production, reducing at the same time waste, environmental damage, and consumption of energy linked with virgin production.

Co-FACTOR aims at speeding-up the industrial up-take of results of the FoF projects I-Ramp3, ReBORN, SelSus, T-Rex, INTEFIX and Power-OM , whose common topic centers around “smart components”. While the prime focus is on gaining benefit for these projects, the proposed measures also seek to link with program level initiatives in a complementary way. Positioning these projects in the core of a larger cluster set-up involving related initiatives as well as the entire stakeholder panorama of the field, Co-FACTOR pursues the 5 major ambitions: Cooperate: establish close partnership among the core cluster to give better visibility to those high-level performing projects among industry, scientific community and policy makers. Communicate: present and promote as a cluster the involved projects and their approaches and achievements among the full range of potential stakeholders as well as public groups and students. Further, to stimulate coherence among “smart components players”. Converge: leverage the impact of the projects by focusing on the cross-cutting issue „smart components“ and assessing reliable and interoperable solutions and standardization opportunities. Connect: facilitate the immediate or short-term exploitation of project results in industrial settings creating a win-win-situation for the technology „push“ and „pull“ site. Consolidate: analyze remaining bottlenecks for „smart components technology“ deployment to formulate thoughtful recommendations for future actions and political framework programs. Co-FACTOR proposes a set of measures spanning from technology assessment, match making among providers and end-user, propelling last-mile exploitation efforts by innovation management and funding outlook, expert workshops, link to research community and roadmapping to outline future R&D&I needs. These will be part of an extensive dissemination campaign featuring intense and strategic communication, organization of events and profound intra-cluster interaction

The aim of this project is to develop a recycling supply chain for rare earth magnets in the EU and to demonstrate these new materials on a pilot scale within a range of application sectors. Rare earth magnets based upon neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB, also containing dysprosium) are used in a wide range of products, including for example clean energy technologies (wind turbines and electric vehicles) and high tech sectors such as electronics. However in recent years the supply of these materials has come under considerable pressure and neodymium and dysprosium are now deemed to be of greatest supply risk for all elements. The EU imports far more NdFeB magnets than it manufactures (>1,000 tonnes manufactured per annum). It has been estimated that ~ 2,000-3,000 tonnes/annum of NdFeB will be available by 2020 for recycling, which presents a significant opportunity. The aim of this project is to identify, separate, recycle and demonstrate recycled magnets at a pilot scale with a multidisciplinary team located across the EU. The project will target three of the main application sectors including automotive, electronics and wind turbines. The project will develop new sensing and robotic sorting lines for the identified EoL products, building upon technologies developed in the FP7 project Remanence. New hydrogen based technologies will be demonstrated at scale for separating and purifying NdFeB powders from the robotically sorted parts and this technology will be duplicated at another partner in the project. The separated powders will be re-manufactured into sintered magnets, injection moulded magnets, metal injection moulded magnets and cast alloys, at 4 different companies across 3 countries, building upon work in the Repromag Horizon 2020 project. A techno economic assessment will be performed for each potential recycling route alongside a life cycle assessment to assess the environmental benefits over primary production.