Supply chain innovations for rare earths

Fund details

Projects can cover one, or more of the following areas:

Upstream processing

• development of sustainable mining processes including beneficiation
• development of novel, sustainable primary processing routes to rare earth oxides
• increased efficiency or productivity improvements for the primary processing to rare earth oxides
• processes to address the management of radioactive by-products

Midstream and downstream processing

• development of novel, sustainable manufacturing routes to rare earth alloys and magnets
• sustainable routes integrating materials from primary and secondary processes
• increased performance of high-performance magnets
• increased efficiency or productivity improvements for downstream REEs product manufacturing, for example, reduction in scrap production

Circularity

• development of processes and services for the collection, identification, separation or dismantling of rare earth containing end-of-life products
• novel and sustainable routes for processing recovered REEs
• design for recycling of products containing REEs
• solutions that enable material provenance
• sustainability models including Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), embedded carbon, radioactivity, environmental social and governance (ESG) solutions

Alternative Materials

• development of novel materials for high-performance magnets
• substitution of materials for high-performance magnets

Eligibility

To lead a project, organisations must:

• be a UK-registered business of any size
• collaborate with other UK-registered organisations

To collaborate with the lead, organisations must be one of the following UK-registered:

• business of any size
• academic institution
• charity
• not for profit
• public sector organisation
• research and technology organisation (RTO)