Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential to modern technology but recycling them remains one of the biggest challenges in the path to a circular economy. In this Circular Drive Initiative (CDI) panel discussion, experts from Microsoft, MOLG, and Alta Resource Technologies explored how innovation, collaboration, and new supply chains can help recover and reuse these critical materials.   Building a Circular Supply Chain for Rare Earths Microsoft’s Louis Kotsakis described how the company’s efforts toward REE recovery began as an internal hackathon project that evolved into a full-scale sustainability initiative. “We started with an idea to recover magnets from hard drives,” he explained. “We failed at first, but we pivoted quickly, building two channels for recycling and disassembly so we can capture magnets directly and send them downstream for rare earth processing.”   These magnets, which are key components in data center hardware, represent a promising domestic source of REEs. Matt Lipscomb of Alta Resource Technologies noted that while the United States has limited mining potential, “the best available source of heavy rare earths isn’t in the ground, it’s in the magnets we already have.”   Alta has developed a clean, scalable process that separates and purifies individual rare earth [...]