Critical Raw Materials Inside Enterprise IT Hardware
By Ali Hassan, Editor, MAH Recycling
Gold is not a critical raw material. The palladium and rare earths inside your retired servers are. That distinction matters to anyone writing an ESG report, because the metal that pays for recycling is often not the one regulators worry about.
What counts as a critical raw material
The EU’s 2023 list names 34 critical raw materials. The Joint Research Centre’s list includes platinum group metals (which cover palladium) and both heavy and light rare earths. Copper sits on the list as a strategic material even though it does not meet the criticality thresholds. Gold does not appear.
The WEEE Forum chose critical raw materials as the theme of International E-Waste Day 2025, and MAH Recycling’s own awareness work follows the same theme.
Where they sit in enterprise hardware
| Material | Where in IT hardware | EU status | Recovery reality |
|---|---|---|---|
| Copper | Circuit boards, cabling, heat sinks | Strategic | Well-established processes |
| Gold | Circuit boards, connectors | Not on the list | Drives the economics of recycling |
| Palladium | Small amounts on circuit boards | Critical, strategic | Hard to recover at scale |
| Neodymium, dysprosium | Magnets in hard drive motors | Critical, strategic | Often lost during shredding |
Copper is the most abundant metal on circuit boards, with small amounts of gold, silver, platinum and palladium alongside it, according to a 2025 paper in the journal Minerals. Memory modules are small circuit boards, so the same logic applies to RAM.
The recovery gap in numbers
The WEEE Forum’s report for International E-Waste Day, prepared by the FutuRaM consortium, counts roughly one million tonnes of critical raw materials in Europe’s annual e-waste (EU27+4), across 29 different materials. In 2022, compliant treatment recovered 162,000 tonnes of copper but only 2 tonnes of palladium. Around 0.1 million tonnes of critical materials went unrecovered even under compliant treatment, mostly rare earths such as neodymium and dysprosium.
Why? The WEEE Forum notes that e-waste rules count weight, so systems reward volume over value. Heavy copper gets recovered because the process is cheap. Small quantities of palladium per tonne of scrap barely move the scale.
Why drive handling changes the answer
Hard drives show the problem clearly. Rare earth magnets sit in both the spindle motor and the voice-coil motor. Researchers writing in the Journal of Material Cycles and Waste Management found that normal recycling dilutes these elements to non-recoverable grades in other material streams. Shredded magnets tend to end up in the ordinary steel stream.
That is the part of the story data-centre teams rarely see. Western Digital, Microsoft and recycling partners have launched a program that recovers rare earth oxides, plus gold, palladium and copper, from retired data-centre drives, as reported by Tom’s Hardware.
None of this overrides data security. A drive that must be destroyed must be destroyed. But the method you choose also decides what survives, so ask your provider where the magnets, boards and aluminium go afterward.
What to ask your recycler
- Which material streams does each device type go into?
- Do you separate circuit boards and magnets before shredding?
- What reporting do we receive on material fate?
Our e-waste recycling services page explains how we handle corporate hardware.
