What are Rare Earth Elements?

The rare earth elements are a group of 17 chemically similar metallic elements found at the bottom of the periodic table. They exhibit a unique combination of physical properties that make them incredibly versatile and essential to modern manufacturing. Despite their name, most rare earth elements are not especially scarce in the Earth’s crust. The challenge is finding deposits where they are sufficiently concentrated and then separating and refining them economically.

Rare earth elements and permanent magnets

Several rare earth elements in particular – namely neodymium, praseodymium, terbium and dysprosium – are used in the production of incredibly compact, lightweight, high-performance permanent magnets. These magnets in turn enable the creation of smaller, more efficient components including generators, speakers, motors and actuators that power many of today's technologies.

For example, the highly efficient motors that propel electric cars, bicycles and scooters all rely on rare earth magnets. The same can be said for the tiny motors and actuators that grant robots and drones the ability to move with extreme precision. Rare earth magnets can also be found at the heart of AI and cloud storage infrastructure – in the actuators that enable hard disk drives to accurately read and store data, and the motors of the cooling systems preventing them from overheating. Closer to home, they are also found in many consumer devices, enabling our headphones to produce crisp, high-quality sound, and our smartphone cameras to bring stunning scenes into focus.

Consequently, rare earth elements underpin a wide range of modern technology. They are therefore in high demand across key sectors such as AI, automotive, robotics, semiconductors, energy, medical and defense.

The rare earth supply chain is vulnerable

However, the world does not currently have a geographically balanced supply of these critical materials.  

As of 2026, approximately 60% of mined rare earth supply and 90% of refined rare earth supply comes from one country: China. This creates significant geopolitical risk and supply chain vulnerability – risks that will only grow as key technology sectors continue to scale and place greater strain on global rare earth supply.

Addressing these supply challenges rapidly cannot be achieved through traditional mining and refining alone: new mines can take more than a decade to begin production, and are also highly capital-intensive, often requiring billions of dollars to develop. Diversifying rare earth supply therefore requires more than finding and extracting new mineral deposits. It requires new sources of rare earth feedstock alongside the infrastructure needed to process and refine those materials.

Urban mining: An untapped source of rare earth elements

The solution lies in urban mining: the process of recovering critical materials from end-of-life products and returning them to the manufacturing supply chain.

Rare earth elements do not disappear when products reach the end of their useful lives. They remain embedded in permanent magnets found in electric motors, hard disk drives, MRI machines and countless other devices. With millions of tons of e-waste discarded each year, these products represent a significant and increasingly important source of rare earth elements.

At Cyclic Materials, we are building the domestic infrastructure required to recover these critical materials from this largely untapped source and prepare them for use in new technologies. By converting discarded products into a new source of rare earth elements, we are helping build a more resilient, geographically diverse, and circular supply of these critical materials.