Safe and environmental-friendly recycling of HDDs supported by AI

Project description:

The aim of the project is to develop an innovative set of solutions ensuring safe, environmentally friendly, and economically efficient recycling of hard drives, particularly those with magnetic data storage media (HDD type). The proposed research places special emphasis on developing solutions that guarantee the secure destruction of sensitive data using a magnetic field (for HDDs) or an electric field (for SSDs), directly at the client’s site.

As for the recycling technology itself, the currently inadequate process of grinding entire hard drives will be replaced by automated disassembly and sorting of their individual components. A key component of the proposed disassembly technology will be a set of innovative solutions utilizing artificial intelligence—both during the various stages of automatic measurement, localization, and identification of disk components, as well as during their disassembly.

Furthermore, the proposed automated hard drive disassembly process will enable the safe destruction of magnetic data carriers (disk platters) through a thermal process, as well as the efficient sorting of disk components intended for recycling, thus supporting the concepts of the Circular Economy and Urban Mining. It should be emphasized that environmental requirements will be taken into account during the recycling process, particularly with regard to materials hazardous to the environment, such as neodymium magnets, from which critical materials from the group of so-called Rare Earth Elements (REE) can be recovered.