Avalon Rare Metals Inc.'s animation of it's flagship property Thor Lake, located near Yellowknife, NWT and the application of rare earth elements in everyday products. (REE's featured: Beryllium, Gallium, Yttrium, Indium, Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium, Europium, Terbium, and Dysprosium).

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Rare earth metals -- a set of 17 chemical elements, including scandium, promethium, yttrium and cerium -- come from a small handful of places in the world. So it's about time that these crucial electric vehicle battery materials started getting recycled on a large scale. Honda announced plans to create what it's calling the world's first mass-production process for doing just that with spent nickel-metal hydride batteries.

Honda dealerships will collect used batteries from customers and then send the parts to Japan Metals and Chemicals for the actual recycling. Japan Metals and Chemicals plans to disassemble the batteries, sort out the active substances, and then extract both rare earth elements as well as the nickel and cobalt. The company already has an established heat treatment process for the extraction, according to Honda.

As much as 80 percent of the rare earth metals in used nickel-metal hydride batteries can be extracted with this new process, the automaker said in a press release. Once they've been extracted, the metals can be reused not only in batteries but in other car parts.

The term "rare earth," while a bit of a historical misnomer, stuck around mainly because these elements aren't likely to be concentrated in exploitable ore deposits, according to the U.S. Geological Survey. Plus, their availability from China, which supplies most of the world's demand, hinges on several volatile factors like environmental regulations, export limits and territorial control of mining operations.

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