Supercool Rare Earths, Recycled: Cyclic Materials Cuts Into China's 90% Head Start
Rare earth magnets power the modern world and the clean energy transition. They’re inside every electric vehicle motor, wind turbine, MRI machine, and computer hard drive in a data center. But the world throws most of them away. Less than 1% are ever recycled. And today, China controls nearly 90% of the global supply.
That’s the crisis Cyclic Materials was built to solve — by turning circularity into industrial reality.
In this episode, co-founder and CEO Ahmad Ghahreman explains how his team figured out what the industry long thought impossible: separating rare earth magnets from steel before they’re lost forever. We explore the engineering that makes rare earth recycling commercially viable, the spoke-and-hub logistics model to power urban mining where end-of-life products are abundant, and why companies like Microsoft, Amazon, BMW, and Jaguar are already lining up to work with Cyclic Materials.
If the clean economy is going to scale, it needs rare earths. Cyclic Materials found a way to recover them — not from a mine, but from the discarded machines all around us.
Show Notes:
Guest: Ahmad Ghahreman - CEO, President, and co-founder
Company: Cyclic Materials
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