The use of rare earth magnets increases in the past twenty years, because of their high performance
in combination with the extensive application area. Therefore the need of critical raw materials like
light and heavy rare earths is enhancing to achieve more performance. The supply risk of these elements
from primary producers turns into a dramatic situation because of the local concentrated production
sides and the insufficient availability. For that reason, recycling could be a chance to put
pressure on the marked leader by generating a suitably product from a waste stream. The strategic
position of recovering metals instead of landfilling allows a decrease of solid waste management
and ensures the possibility to recover critical raw materials. The majority of the rare earths production
is used for high performance magnets. Such are appropriated in simple devices like hard disc
drives for data storage. The problem of recovering these metals is the complex structure of different
materials surrounding and the missing pre-treatment step before separating them without discharging
into a wrong material fraction. The aim of this work is to point out a recycling concept for recovering
magnets from hard disc drives in a preparation treatment for feeding them into a hydrometallurgical
process. This step is construed to recover rare earth elements with ideal prerequisite
for further processing with as less steps as possible and also to save chemical input materials to get
a sustained success. In addition the process allows an environmental-oriented closed-loop circulation
of the acid with integrated regeneration step to achieve maximum recycling rates. An advantage
of the recirculation is based on the enrichment of boron under the investigated conditions
with subsequent possibility of recovering.