Researchers spent the entire fall of 2019 in the laboratory inside Google data center in Mayes County, Oklahoma disassembling old hard disks in order to extract a 2-inch long component known as magnet assembly. Following the extraction, the researchers sent thousands of used magnetic assemblies to a hard drive maker to reuse them in new hard drives. The project by Google aims to reduce the environmental carbon footprint from hard drives and recycle rare earth magnets instead of dumping them as scrap.
“A hard drive sitting in your computer at home requires you as the consumer to take it to a recycler,” said Kali Frost, a doctoral student in industrial sustainability at Purdue University. “Data centers are already a supply of millions of hard drives. The companies operating those data centers want to handle them in the best way possible, and increasingly, optimize them for sustainability.”
These include proper care of cleanliness during magnet recycling as modern hard drives are very sensitive to small particles and the fact that we see new magnet design every year. Nonetheless, while turning this into reality is still far away, the actual plan of actions and baby steps towards those make us believe that it is not too far.
