Europium (Eu) recycling exists, but it is not like copper or aluminum. Most europium demand has historically been tied to phosphors, especially in fluorescent lighting. That means the best recycling feed is not "random e-waste", it's concentrated phosphor powder from end-of-life lamps and lamp manufacturing scrap.
Europium is typically used in small concentrations inside functional materials (phosphors, inks, some specialty ceramics). When it's dispersed, collection and processing costs usually swamp the contained value. That's why urban mining for Eu is structurally limited and why most rare earth recycling discussions keep circling back to fluorescent lamp phosphors.
A workable lamp-phosphor recycling chain looks like this:
The big point: you are not "recycling europium from lamps" so much as recycling a rare-earth-rich phosphor fraction and then recovering Eu from that fraction.
Phosphor powder is one of the few end-of-life materials where rare earths are present at concentrations that can justify chemistry, especially Y and Eu in red phosphors like Y₂O₃:Eu³⁺.
A common flowsheet is:
Peer-reviewed work specifically covers yttrium and europium recovery from waste tube-light phosphor powder leach liquor using solvent extraction, and then chemical reduction steps that help with Eu separation.
Some research demonstrates recovery of Y and Eu from waste phosphors through chlorination roasting followed by water leaching, then downstream purification.
Europium is one of the few rare earths where oxidation state manipulation can be used to separate it more cleanly from neighbors. Many practical flowsheets leverage a reduction step (Eu³⁺ toward Eu²⁺ behavior) to enable selective separation, because Eu sits in a tight region of the rare earth series.
This is the part most people dodge.
Europium recycling from lighting is linked to the fluorescent lighting era. As the world shifted to LEDs, end-of-life fluorescent lamp volumes and "phosphor-rich" feedstock dynamics changed. Research on the economic feasibility of recycling rare earth oxides from end-of-life lighting technologies finds that EoL REO availability from lighting was expected to peak in a window roughly 2020-2027, and that feasibility is highly sensitive to scale and prices.
In plain terms:
A concrete example is Solvay's LIFE "LOOP" project, designed around recycling rare earths from used fluorescent lamps. It's useful because it shows what "real" looks like: collection, pre-processing, and chemical recovery in an industrial context, not a lab beaker.
General e-waste recycling can recover valuable metals (copper, gold, palladium), but europium usually appears in low concentrations and complex matrices. EU-level work on rare earth recovery from e-waste consistently treats REE recycling as challenging and limited compared with bulk and precious metals recovery.
There are emerging studies looking at rare earth presence in modern lighting components like LEDs, but identification of REEs in components is not the same as an economically stable recovery pathway at scale.
If you want the "what replaces Eu when supply is tight" angle, go to substitutes.
If you want the investing reality (how to get exposure without pretending Eu is an exchange commodity), go to investing.
Fluorescent lamp phosphor powder is the most practical source because it concentrates rare earth phosphors (including Eu-bearing red phosphors) into a recoverable fraction.
Because europium is typically a low-level dopant embedded in complex materials. Collection is scattered, concentrations are low, and the chemistry needed to extract and separate Eu is expensive relative to the contained value.
Harder in many places, because the best feedstock comes from fluorescent lamps and that stream is shrinking as LEDs replace older lighting. Economic feasibility depends heavily on scale, utilization, and price conditions.