Editor’s note: Electronics recycling will be featured in sessions at the 2026 E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference in New Orleans October 26-28.
ERI, one of the largest electronics recycling and IT asset disposition companies in the United States, has entered a strategic partnership with Cyclic Materials, a Mesa, Arizona-based company that recovers rare earth elements from end-of-life products. The companies announced the deal July 21, framing it as an effort to build out one of the largest rare earth recovery networks in the US by linking ERI’s collection infrastructure to Cyclic’s processing and refining capacity.
The arrangement is built around a straightforward supply-chain gap: enormous quantities of rare earths and other critical minerals sit inside electronics that get discarded every year, largely unrecovered. Both companies are betting that pulling those materials back out of circulation, rather than waiting on new mining projects, offers a faster route to shoring up domestic supply.
Under the agreement, ERI will use its eight US recycling facilities to sort and pre-process material from magnet-bearing electronics, then route it to Cyclic Materials for rare earth extraction. ERI processes roughly a million pounds of electronic waste daily, giving Cyclic a large and steady stream of potential feedstock. The two companies say they have already begun sampling and qualifying several high-volume product categories for the program, with most of that material headed to Cyclic’s Arizona plant, which has capacity to handle up to 25,000 tons of end-of-life components a year.
Beyond rare earths, Cyclic’s recovery process also pulls out other recoverable metals, including copper and aluminum, from the same feedstock. The companies also plan to jointly pursue government and commercial contracts — including RFPs — tied to critical mineral recycling and circular supply chain development.
Cyclic Materials CEO and founder Ahmad Ghahreman said the partnership turns ERI’s processing volume into a meaningful new domestic source of rare earths, and characterized it as a way to reduce reliance on foreign trade relationships while strengthening supply chain resilience and national security. ERI Chairman and CEO John Shegerian said the deal brings new efficiency to closing the loop on critical minerals, pointing to Cyclic’s technology and Arizona facility as making rare earth circularity more commercially viable than it has been previously.
ERI says it uses proprietary AI-driven software and hardware to identify and isolate magnet-containing material at a level of purity that makes it usable feedstock for Cyclic’s recovery process. The company holds ISO 27001 and SOC 2 Type II certifications and says it has the capacity to process more than a billion pounds of e-waste annually across its US locations.
The deal comes as US policymakers continue to press for a domestic rare earth supply less dependent on imports, particularly from China, which dominates global rare earth refining. Cyclic Materials, for its part, has been expanding beyond North America, with recovery operations also underway in Europe and Asia. The company has previously highlighted early commercial shipments of recycled rare earth oxides to customers as it scales up from demonstration to commercial volumes.
Rare earth magnets recovered through the partnership would be refined into oxides for use in new permanent magnets — materials in demand across automotive, defense, robotics, electronics and AI hardware manufacturing, sectors where rare earth supply constraints have drawn increasing attention from US industry and government.
Neither company disclosed financial terms of the agreement.
