Western Digital, together with Microsoft and a number of companies that recycle used electronics, has set up a chain of efficient hard drive recycling in the United States. The precious metals and rare earth elements extracted from e-waste remain in the country and are returned to manufacturers of new products. This reduces dependence on supplies from China and significantly reduces greenhouse gas emissions on the planet.
Image source: Western Digital
While most casual users might have the impression that hard drives are a relic of a bygone era (how can they compare to SSDs?), data centers, on the contrary, continue to use magnetic platter drives en masse. This means millions of tons of waste every 3-5 years. Companies have come to understand the importance of recycling such raw materials, rather than disposing of them in landfills, as was the case until recently. This has been especially encouraged by China, which recently banned the supply of a number of rare earth elements to the United States and other Western partners.
After agreeing on all the details and taking into account the experience gained in pilot projects, Western Digital, together with Microsoft, is pleased to announce the launch of a large-scale hard drive recycling program in the United States. In the future, other owners of large data centers will join the program, but for now, drives are mainly sent for recycling from Microsoft centers. There, hard drives are shredded – this guarantees complete protection of data from leaks – and then sent for recycling to Critical Materials Recycling (CMR) and PedalPoint Recycling (a subsidiary of Korea Zinc Company).
Critical Materials Recycling extracts rare earth elements from crushed HDDs, while PedalPoint extracts everything else: gold, palladium, copper, steel, and aluminum. The extraction process uses gentle, relatively environmentally friendly, acid-free processes to preserve as much of the valuable raw material as possible.
According to WD, the program has already returned more than 21 tons of resources to the supply chain. Up to 80% of valuable raw materials can be recovered from crushed HDDs, SSDs, and chassis components, and the recovery rate for rare earth elements exceeds 90%. Extracting the same resources from ore and transporting them to the U.S. would increase greenhouse gas emissions by 95%.
All this is just the beginning of a long journey. The potential need for hard drive recycling is huge and growing. According to the Financial Times, as of 2022, there were 23,000 data centers with 70 million servers. Each of these servers contains arrays of hard drives that are approaching the end of their useful life. By 2030, the amount of e-waste is expected to reach 75 million tons.