NEWS

Workshop on Women Leadership Development

17-12-2025

Empowering Women in Deep Tech Leadership

The NEO-CYCLE project successfully held its first online workshop on Women Leadership Development, bringing together around 40 participants from research, industry, and public authorities across Europe.

The workshop explored key barriers and enablers for women’s career progression in deep tech, with a forward-looking discussion on the strategic role of women leaders by 2035. Facilitated by Olga Trofymova, participants highlighted the need to address systemic barriers such as gender bias and the maternity penalty, strengthen structural support through inclusive policies and flexible work models, and increase the visibility of women role models in leadership positions.

“These discussions are an important step toward inclusive innovation within the NEO-CYCLE project,” noted E. Macarena García-Ayala, emphasizing the strong engagement and shared commitment of participants.

The insights gathered will be integrated into the NEO-CYCLE framework, reinforcing the project’s commitment to gender equality as a key driver of sustainable innovation, including the circular upcycling of rare-earth magnets from e-waste.

Consortium Meeting in Pavia

23-09-2025

As part of the upcoming annual Consortium Meeting in Pavia on 1 October, Fraunhofer IKTS, together with Confagricoltura will be hosting a training course:
“Basic Hydrometallurgy Course for Metal Dissolution and Separation.”
This course will provide valuable insights into the fundamentals of hydrometallurgy, focusing on dissolution and separation techniques essential for advancing sustainable recycling and resource recovery.
🌍 The session will be available both on-site and online, ensuring everyone can take part!
This course is recommended for stakeholders in the four NEO-CYCLE project value chains — pharmaceutical, ammonia, fertilizers, and polymers — supporting the sustainable upcycling of spent NdFeB magnets from HDDs.
💡 We look forward to your participation in driving innovation in circular economy and critical raw materials!

👉 Click here to register

🚀 NEO-CYCLE 1st e-newsletter

22-08-2025

The NEO-CYCLE Horizon Europe project is advancing sustainable upcycling of NdFeB magnets, turning e-waste into high-quality materials for green applications. Since its kick-off in Sevilla, the consortium has made strong progress — from magnet collection and innovative recovery processes to digital modeling and pilot plant design.

Recent highlights include presentations at Ecomondo 2024, the EURAW Seville conference, and SETAC Europe 2025, as well as a workshop on gender equality in engineering. The project has also released its first press release and launched an interactive quiz to raise awareness.

Stay tuned as NEO-CYCLE moves into its crucial second year, scaling up recovery processes and shaping a sustainable future for critical raw materials.

👉 Read more

🌍 NEO-CYCLE Factsheet Released

18-08-2025

The NEO-CYCLE project is demonstrating innovative methods to sustainably upcycle NdFeB magnets from hard disk drives, turning waste into catalysts for pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, polymers, and green ammonia. By combining advanced processes such as Solid-State Chlorination and electrochemical extraction with sustainability assessments and digital product passports, NEO-CYCLE strengthens Europe’s capacity to recycle rare earths and boron.

This initiative ensures a secure supply of critical raw materials while fostering a circular economy and supporting Europe’s strategic autonomy in green technologies.

👉 Discover more

Neo-Cycle project update

14-05-2025

📢 We’re proud to announce that the first press release of the Neo-Cycle project is now live!
📰 Read more about how Neo-Cycle is driving breakthrough technologies for upcycling critical raw materials — from element recovery to women’s leadership in sustainability:

Baltic News Service (BNS) agency

The Baltic Times VMU webpage

European Raw Materials Clustering Event

08-11-2024

Neo-Cycle was recently presented at the European Raw Materials Clustering Event in Seville, Spain, and at Ecomondo, the leading annual fair in the green and circular economy sectors in Rimini, Italy.

overview

The NEO-CYCLE project aims to demonstrate at TRL6 the sustainable upcycling of spent NdFeB magnets comings from hard disks drives (HDDs), reaching high quality end products for 4 case studies: pharmaceutical, ammonia, fertilizers, and polymers industries; and will include necessary paths to reach the market uptake. To reach this aim, NEO-CYCLE involves all the relevant actors in the value chain, from public authorities to WEEE recycler companies, technology developers, associations, NGOs, SMEs and commercial companies in the targeted sectors.

project timeline

partners

NEO-CYCLE consortium is a multidisciplinary team of 23 partners from 13 countries to be able to demonstrate the technical, economic, and social feasibility of the developed solution and bring it to the next level paving the market uptake. Each of them contributes to a core activity to the consortium and interacts with other partners in a direct way. The consortium is composed of 2 WEEE recycler SME companies, 4 public and non-public research organisations, 6 universities, 4 end-users that will demonstrate the viability of the upscaled processes as well as the validation of the obtained upcycled products, 1 SME company focused on sustainability assessments, 1 expert cluster in stakeholders’ engagement in materials value chains, 2 SME companies dealing with social participation, communication, dissemination and 2 NGOs for skills development and standardisation. Additionally, a public authority (Lombardy Region, REG) is also associated partner. The project coordinator IDENER.AI has a wide experience in EU research, with a portfolio of 59 funded projects from 10 years ago.