Erbium Recycling: Manufacturing Scrap vs End-of-Life Challenges

Erbium (Er) recycling sounds straightforward until you look at where erbium actually sits in products. In telecom and photonics, erbium is typically a dopant dispersed through glass, often at very low concentrations (commonly hundreds of ppm by weight, and in some fiber designs capped around 100 wt ppm unless co-doped). That dispersion is the core reason erbium recycling is niche: the metal is valuable, but it is diluted, hard to liberate, and expensive to separate cleanly.

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Context: Erbium Uses | Supply Chain | Mining and Processing

The Blunt Reality: Erbium Recycling Is Not a Volume Story Yet

Even for rare earths overall, recycling is still limited. USGS continues to summarize rare earth recycling as occurring only in limited quantities, mainly from batteries, permanent magnets, and fluorescent lamps. Erbium is not the headline metal in those established streams (magnets are NdPr-heavy; lamps are typically Y/Eu/Tb-rich), so erbium recycling tends to be smaller and more specialized than the "rare earth recycling" narrative implies.

Where Recyclable Erbium Actually Comes From

Manufacturing Scrap from Photonics and Doped-Fiber Production (the best feedstock)

This is the most realistic near-term erbium recycling stream because it's concentrated relative to end-of-life products and is easier to collect.

Typical sources:

• Off-spec fiber preforms and preform glass scrap
• Fiber draw waste and cut-offs
• Rejected doped glass batches
• Specialty optics process scrap (smaller volumes, higher purity expectations)

Why this works better than end-of-life: you can collect it at the factory gate and you often know what's in it.

"Doped Fibers" Used in Non-Telecom Applications (small, but technically clear)

A good example is luminescent fibers used in security papers (banknotes and security documents). A 2025 study presents a digestion + solvent-extraction approach and explicitly lists erbium among the recovered rare earths (Er, Y, La, Gd, Yb, Ho, Tm, Tb, Eu), with many extracted at high percentages in their tests.

This is not going to solve global erbium supply, but it shows what "recyclable erbium" looks like when the feedstock is known and concentrated enough to justify chemistry.

End-of-Life Telecom Gear (real, but structurally hard)

In theory, decommissioned optical components and network hardware contain erbium-bearing parts. In practice:

• Erbium is often present as a dispersed dopant in glass
• Dismantling and sorting costs dominate
• Chemical liberation requires aggressive digestion routes and strong waste controls

So this is a long-term stream that improves only when collection and disassembly systems get cheaper and more standardized.

"General E-Waste Rare Earth Recycling" (mostly not erbium-led)

Most scaling efforts in rare earth recycling focus on magnets (for EVs and wind) because that's where the mass is. Reuters notes the EU has targeted 25% of critical-mineral demand from recycling by 2030 under the Critical Raw Materials Act, but today less than 1% of rare earths are recycled in the EU, and near-term volumes are constrained by collection and economics.

That macro push matters, but erbium is usually a side-benefit rather than the main recovered value.

How Erbium Is Recovered (What the Chemistry Usually Looks Like)

Erbium recovery is basically: liberate REEs from a host matrix → separate erbium from other REEs → finish into a saleable form (often Er₂O₃ or Er salts).

Pre-Processing (make the feed predictable)

• Remove polymers, coatings, and housings (where relevant)
• Size reduction (crushing/milling) to increase reaction surface area
• Sorting by feed type (preform glass vs mixed scrap)

If this step is sloppy, everything downstream gets more expensive.

Digestion or Leaching (liberate erbium into solution)

For glassy materials, you often need more aggressive conditions than typical metal scrap because erbium is inside a silica-rich matrix.

A practical warning: digestion routes that work technically can become the limiting factor commercially due to reagent handling, corrosion, and wastewater constraints.

Separation (where the real cost lives)

Erbium sits among neighboring heavy rare earths (Ho, Tm, Yb, Lu) and is commonly intertwined with yttrium-heavy streams. Producing erbium at consistent purity tends to require solvent extraction or similar staged separation, not a single "filter step".

The luminescent-fiber recycling paper is a clean illustration of this: they use leaching plus solvent extraction and discuss how extractant choice and acid concentration drives selectivity and recovery, with strong performance for heavy REEs under their optimized conditions.

Finishing (what buyers actually take)

• Precipitation (often oxalate/carbonate routes)
• Calcination to erbium oxide (Er₂O₃), or conversion to erbium salts for specialty supply chains

Photonics customers care about batch-to-batch consistency, not just a one-time purity assay.

Why Erbium Recycling Struggles to Scale Fast

Collection and Sorting Are the Bottleneck, Not Lab Chemistry

When erbium is diluted and dispersed, you need very cheap preprocessing to make it work.

Er Is a Dopant in Key Applications

Low concentrations (often ppm-level in fiber) mean you move a lot of material to recover a little erbium.

Qualification Friction

Even "recycled erbium oxide" has to meet tight impurity constraints for optics. If customers treat it as a new supplier, qualification slows adoption.

Economics Depend on Co-Recovery

Most viable erbium recycling cases work best when the same process also recovers a basket (Y, Yb, Ho, Tm, etc.), not erbium alone.

A Practical Checklist for Evaluating an Erbium Recycling Claim

Feedstock Reality

• Is the feed manufacturing scrap (best) or mixed end-of-life (hard)?
• Is there a contract for volume, or is it "available in theory"?

Process Realism

• How is erbium liberated from the matrix (digestion route)?
• What is the separation method (multi-stage or single-step claims)?
• How are wastes and effluents handled (permits and cost)?

Product Reality

• Are they selling Er₂O₃, erbium salts, or a mixed RE product?
• Do they have repeatability data (multiple batches) and customer qualification?

Erbium Recycling FAQ

Is erbium recycling a major supply source today?

No. Rare earth recycling overall is still limited, and erbium is typically not the dominant value driver in the established recycling streams.

What's the most realistic erbium recycling feedstock?

Manufacturing scrap from photonics and doped-fiber supply chains, because it's easier to collect and more compositionally predictable than end-of-life telecom gear.

Does policy pressure change this?

It can improve collection and investment over time. The EU has set a recycling target (25% by 2030 for critical minerals), but current rare earth recycling rates are still very low, and scale-up is constrained by collection economics.