Kann: Rare earth recycling avoids complex separation steps needed in virgin mining
Shayle Kann · Volts crossover: Six big energy questions · Feb 25, 2026 · at 51:44
Shayle Kann explains why the unit economics of rare earth recycling should undercut virgin extraction.
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“There are actually 16 rare earth elements that are grouped together. We really only use four of them, actually. Like, we only care about four of them out of the 16. If you're doing mining, virgin mining, you get this, like, basket of all of them, and you have to do this, like, complicated separations process to get the stuff you want. If you're doing recycling, you're only getting the stuff we were using in the first place already, so you've already cut out a bunch of Expensive separation steps in the value chain there. So there's a bunch of reasons why, like, fundamentally, I think it should be cheaper.”
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