UK based company Silex World announced the development of a modular micro-refinery platform. This platform is designed to enable distributed refining of rare earth elements and strategic metals closer to feedstock sources and manufacturing supply chains.

The platform integrates the company’s alkali-based recovery process, continuous low-energy conversion system, and digital traceability architecture into compact modular units. These are intended for deployment near recycling centres, industrial waste streams, ports, and advanced manufacturing clusters.

Silex is currently advancing its first industrial rollout in India, with the objective of validating continuous modular processing under real-world operating conditions before wider deployment across the United States and Europe.

Compatibility across multiple rare earth-containing feedstocks

“The bottleneck in critical materials is no longer just mining. It is refining capacity. What we are building is deployable processing infrastructure that can operate closer to feedstock, manufacturing, and strategic demand,” said Michael Hodges, Founder of Silex World Ltd.

“The future of critical materials production is unlikely to be dominated by a handful of giant refineries. It will increasingly depend on distributed processing networks that are regional, traceable, and resilient.”

The platform has been developed with compatibility across multiple rare earth-containing feedstocks and industrial material streams. Silex World is currently engaging with industrial partners, government bodies, and regional stakeholders to explore deployment opportunities for modular processing systems in strategic markets, according to a press release.

Silex World is a University of Leeds spinout company. Its area of expertise is in alkali-based chemical pre-treatment process. This inert atmosphere-controlled process allows for the selective extraction and concentration of rare earth oxides from complex waste streams, without relying on conventional acid-intensive hydrometallurgy. This results in a cleaner, more scalable approach to rare earth recycling that reduces energy use, lowers emissions, and offers higher material recovery rates compared to traditional techniques.

The company’s primary feedstock are the end-of-life NdFeB (neodymium-iron-boron) permanent magnets. These are widely used across consumer electronics, electric motors, and renewable energy infrastructure. These magnets are primarily composed of neodymium and praseodymium, often with dysprosium and terbium as performance-enhancing additives. This makes them a rich source of rare earth recovery. However due to the absence of an integrated tracking or separation system most of the these are currently lost to landfill or low-grade recovery processes.

Mitigating geopolitical risk

According to International Energy Agency (IEA), rare earths exhibit one of the highest levels of geographical concentrations across the value chain. In 2024, the People’s Republic of China accounted for 60% of global mined production of magnet rare earths. For refining, the level of concentration is even more pronounced, as the country represented 91% of global refined output. In same year China accounted for around 94% of the production of sintered permanent magnets.

Western governments are increasingly recognizing these strategic bottlenecks in mining, refining and processing capacity for critical minerals. The existing supply chains remain heavily concentrated in large centralised facilities, increasing geopolitical risk exposure, transport inefficiencies, and barriers to rapid regional scale-up.

Silex’s approach is designed around smaller-scale processing infrastructure capable of operating closer to end-of-life NdFeB magnets, industrial residues, manufacturing scrap, and downstream industrial demand. According to the company, this distributed refining model could significantly improve supply chain resilience while reducing transport dependency, infrastructure intensity, and reliance on geographically concentrated processing capacity.

Silex intellectual property portfolio also includes methods for extracting titania, vanadium oxide, niobium, and tantalum from oxide-based materials. It is also pioneering research into the reuse of uranium and thorium residue by products. These are found in mineral waste and could be utilized for future nuclear energy applications. The company is currently seeking strategic partners and early-stage investment to accelerate the scale-up of its processes from laboratory to pilot and to commercial demonstration levels.