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 For more low-carbon innovations now scaling—and the playbooks driving their market adoption—subscribe to the podcast plus our: * Weekly Newsletter * Climate Adoption Playbook * Supercool on Instagram * Supercool on LinkedIn

Reprised | Rare Earths, Recycled: Cyclic Materials Cuts Into China's 90% Head Start

Supercool

Welcome to Supercool, a show about climate innovation, business and how the future is being built. I'm your host, Josh Dorfman. When we started Planted in 2021 to pull carbon from the atmosphere and turn it into something useful and durable, I began thinking about materials differently. Most of us experience the economy through finished products. We see the house, not the structural panels inside its walls.

We see the electric vehicle, not the metal inside its motor. We see the wind turbine, the data center, the MRI machine, not the rare earth magnets that help make them work. But when you build a materials company, you learn that the products shaping our lives depend on what happens much further upstream. Where do the raw materials come from? Can you secure enough of them? And how quickly can you increase supply when demand takes off?

Those questions have become urgent for Rare Earths. Rare Earth magnets make highly efficient electric motors possible. They power electric vehicles, wind turbines, robots, appliances, industrial equipment and the hard drives inside AI data centers. There is no electrified future without them. Yet China controls more than 90% of the global supply, which has become a source of economic and national security friction. And despite their enormous value, in America we recycle almost none of them.

These critical metals are mined, manufactured into machines, used for years and then thrown away. Ahmad Garaman saw a different possibility. Ahmad is the co-founder and CEO of Cyclic Materials. His insight was that the fastest new source of rare earth metals wouldn't necessarily come from digging new mines. It would come from the millions of motors, hard drives, appliances and machines already all around us. Cyclic developed technology to separate rare earth magnets from end of life products.

Reprised | Rare Earths, Recycled: Cyclic Materials Cuts Into China's 90% Head Start

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.

Reprised | Rare Earths, Recycled: Cyclic Materials Cuts Into China's 90% Head Start

Read the full transcript

The candid version is on a podcast, not the earnings call.

The candid version is on a podcast,
not the earnings call.