Looking at some of the concentrations for neodymium and praseodymium... why _isn't_ magnet recycling more of thing? Certainly extracting those elements from waste is cheaper than raw ore.
It doesn't seem like the temperature requirements are outside of something one could do with pretty low end hardware, but the problem is that a lot of the equipment you might have to say do this in your garage would be ferrous, which is problematic. Maybe a recycling center wouldn't have that problem?
They stick to metal.
And that's not counting all of the ferrous things in your equipment that it can stick to and cause damage by friction or backing things up into something that isn't designed for back pressure.
Edit: Daughter really liked using the shiny platters in art projects (after degaussing with the RE magnets). I've reused some of the dc motors in other projects (arduino type stuff). All that's left is the small circuit board, read/write head and metal body to recycle.
I have loads of the bloody things - I dismantled a Equallogic PS6something that had 30 odd discs in it for recycling the other day. I, sorry: "we" still have four more old Eqls and a stack of discs removed from old PCs. You can break the case of a 3.5" disc with a lump hammer and cold chisel and then unscrew or break out the magnets quite quickly. I need to look into breaking a 2.5" disc. You could speed things up with a bandsaw with a suitable blade and a careful cut.
(1) I'm called Granddad by two little girls, so let's ditch the ageist bollocks (po faced emoji). How about great granddad instead! My dad does sport a heart restart device (I can't remember the name) and it is probably not going to work very well after close contact with a neodymium magnet that nearly tore off one of my fingernails - OK I nearly did the tearing but it was the vice that did the holding with my fridge.
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