The 8th Rare Earth Roundtable online event – jointly organised by EIT RawMaterials’ Strategic Impact Group Network on Rare Earths and the MAGELLAN project – brought together practitioners and researchers to discuss what Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) can (and cannot) tell us about the environmental impacts of Rare Earth Permanent Magnets.
The event brought together experts and researchers working across the rare earth permanent magnet value chain to discuss how LCA can be applied in a way that is both methodologically robust and practically useful for industry, policymakers and other stakeholders. The session highlighted a shared challenge: magnets sit at the intersection of complex, globally distributed upstream supply chains and rapidly growing demand from strategic applications, which makes transparent assumptions, consistent boundaries and credible data especially important when interpreting sustainability claims.
The discussion, moderated by Nabeel Mancheri (Senior Advisor, EIT RawMaterials), evolved through presentations and the audience’s questions, keeping the focus on what LCA can reveal about hotspots and trade-offs – while also acknowledging the real-world constraints that determine whether circular routes and design improvements can be implemented at scale.
Turning LCA into a practical decision tool
Robert Pell (CEO & Founder, Minviro) opened the session by framing LCA as a tool that is increasingly expected to support decisions – not just provide retrospective reporting – especially as sustainability requirements tighten and customers, investors, and policymakers ask for traceable evidence rather than high-level claims. After introducing why rare earth and magnet LCAs are particularly challenging (complex supply chains, multi-output processing and allocation choices, and uneven availability of primary data), Robert emphasised the need for clearer harmonisation so results can be compared responsibly across studies and suppliers. He then shifted from concepts to application by narrating a video demonstration of Minviro’s Xycle tool, showing how a digital platform can help practitioners explore and communicate LCA results more transparently by surfacing assumptions, tracing hotspots across value-chain stages, and enabling scenario thinking (for example, how changes in electricity sourcing or processing choices influence outcomes). The overarching message was that credible LCA for rare earths and magnets depends as much on methodological discipline and data governance as on the calculation itself, and that accessible tools can make it easier for non-specialists to interrogate results without losing the underlying rigour.
MAGELLAN’s LCA/LCC baseline and what it enables
Jan Klenner (Sustainability Technologist, Lomartov) followed by explaining how MAGELLAN is using LCA together with Life Cycle Costing (LCC) to build a robust evidence base for the project’s sustainability and market rationale – starting with a clear reference route for rare earth permanent magnet production and then using it as a benchmark to test improvement options as MAGELLAN results mature. After briefly outlining the scope and logic of the baseline (what is included, what is excluded, and why those boundary choices matter), Jan focused on what the assessments are for: identifying hotspots and decision levers that can genuinely shift both environmental performance and economic feasibility. He emphasised that, even when magnets are a relatively small component in larger systems, their impacts and costs can be strongly shaped upstream by rare earth production routes, electricity mixes, and the availability of circular feedstocks – so credible comparisons require consistent assumptions and transparent documentation. Jan also highlighted the practical value of the LCC lens: it captures how sensitive magnet costs can be to raw-material prices and volatility, and why recycling, supply diversification and efficiency gains matter not only for sustainability but also for long-term industrial resilience and adoption pathways.
Comparing circular routes and what drives the differences
Maarten Koese (PhD candidate, Leiden University) presented work from the REEsilience project, using LCA to compare several practical circularity pathways for magnets – from long-loop recycling (recovering rare earths through separation and refining routes) to short-loop magnet-to-magnet approaches, as well as a reuse-oriented route that keeps more value in the material for longer. Maarten’s focus was on what actually explains the differences between these options: which steps dominate impacts, where energy and chemicals enter the picture, and how quickly results can change if key assumptions shift. He stressed that recycling is not one single category – different routes have different strengths and trade-offs – and that robust interpretation depends on being explicit about aspects such as feedstock quality, process yields, and whether small additions of primary material are needed to maintain magnet performance. Beyond modelling, Maarten also pointed to real-world constraints that shape feasibility and scale: magnets are embedded in products with diverse designs, end-of-life flows are complex, and reliable collection and sorting often determine whether circular options can deliver on their LCA potential – linking the technical analysis to the broader need for design-for-disassembly and better recovery systems.
Reducing heavy rare earth reliance through material efficiency
Stellina Samuel (PhD candidate, Leiden University) closed the presentations by focusing on material efficiency as a complementary sustainability strategy to recycling – specifically, how reducing reliance on heavy rare earths such as dysprosium can influence environmental performance while still meeting demanding functional requirements. Stellina explained why this matters in practice: dysprosium is used to help NdFeB magnets retain performance at higher temperatures (relevant for applications like EV traction motors and wind generators), yet its supply chain can carry heightened environmental burdens and criticality concerns. Her presentation outlined how LCA can be used to test composition scenarios and identify which parts of the upstream chain drive impacts when heavy rare earth content changes, including the influence of mining and processing conditions and the way recovery performance affects the footprint per unit of material delivered. Rather than presenting material substitution as a simple “swap”, Stellina highlighted it as a design challenge that needs to balance sustainability, performance and supply risk – showing how LCA can support R&D choices by clarifying where reductions are most meaningful and where trade-offs may emerge across impact categories.
Q&A: comparability, assumptions, and what it takes to scale circular magnets
In the Q&A that followed, the discussion shifted from individual studies to the shared practical questions that sit behind “LCA-ready” decision-making for magnets. A key theme was comparability: how to ensure different studies can be meaningfully compared when supply chains are multi-output and results depend on methodological choices and on whether alternative magnet compositions and chemistries can be functionally equivalent in performance rather than merely comparable by mass. Speakers also returned to the importance of being explicit about assumptions and data quality, including how sensitive outcomes can be to electricity mixes, processing routes, and small changes in inputs required to meet magnet specifications – reinforcing that transparency is what turns LCA from a marketing exercise into a credible management tool. Finally, participants highlighted deployment reality issues that LCAs alone cannot solve: end-of-life magnets are often difficult to access, identify and separate, so scaling circular routes depends on better collection systems, sorting and pre-processing capacity, and ultimately design-for-disassembly and recovery so that valuable magnetic material is not lost to mixed scrap streams.
Cross-cutting takeaways from the roundtable
- Upstream choices dominate. For rare earth permanent magnets, impacts are often shaped most strongly by how rare earths are sourced, processed, and their value chains powered – so electricity mix and upstream processing decisions can outweigh downstream steps.
- Comparable LCAs need harmonised rules and transparency. Allocation choices, system boundaries, and data quality can materially influence results, so clear documentation and emerging harmonisation efforts are essential for credible comparisons.
- Circularity has multiple routes, not a single answer. Long-loop, short-loop, and reuse pathways can each offer benefits, but performance depends on real-world factors such as feedstock quality, yields, and operational constraints.
- Material efficiency matters as much as recycling. Reducing reliance on heavy rare earths (where feasible while maintaining performance) can lower impacts and reduce exposure to critical supply risks.
- Design for recovery is the scaling lever. Without better access to magnets at end-of-life – through product design, dismantling practices, and sorting/collection systems – the most promising circular pathways will remain difficult to implement at scale.
The MAGELLAN Project thanks all speakers and participants for their contributions. The recording of the event is available on our project’s YouTube channel.
