Ionic Technologies has submitted plans for an £89m rare-earth magnet recycling and refining facility in Belfast, taking a proposed commercial-scale plant into the city’s planning process.
The 10,798-square-metre development would be built on a previously developed site at Harland Road in Channel Commercial Park. The plans cover a recycling and refining plant, offices, parking, landscaping, and supporting infrastructure.
If approved, the facility would create 55 jobs and safeguard another 25 positions. Economic assessments accompanying the proposal also point to construction activity and additional economic output during development and operation.
The plant would recover rare-earth elements from end-of-life permanent magnets and manufacturing waste before separating and refining them into high-purity rare-earth oxides. Those materials are used in technologies including electric vehicles, wind turbines, aerospace, defence equipment, and advanced manufacturing.
Ionic Technologies already operates a demonstration plant in Belfast. Its process has been developed to recover high-purity neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium oxides from magnet material, providing the technical basis for the proposed commercial expansion.
The company traces its technology to research begun at Queen’s University Belfast. Seren Technologies was established as a university spin-out in 2016 and was later acquired and renamed Ionic Technologies.
The demonstration facility was commissioned in Belfast in 2023, allowing the company to move from laboratory and pilot work into continuous processing of magnet waste. The proposed £89m development would represent a much larger step towards commercial output.
Rare-earth magnet recycling has acquired greater strategic importance because global refining and magnet supply chains remain highly concentrated. Permanent magnets are critical components in high-performance electric motors and generators, giving them a role in industries ranging from renewable energy to defence.
That concentration creates several risks for manufacturers. Trade restrictions, geopolitical disputes, transport disruption, or rapid increases in demand can affect access to refined materials even when sufficient rare-earth deposits exist globally.
Recycling provides one route to diversify supply without opening new mines. Manufacturing scrap can be recovered relatively quickly, while end-of-life products offer an expanding secondary material source as more electric vehicles, turbines, and industrial equipment eventually reach retirement.
The available volume remains a constraint. Many products containing rare-earth magnets remain in service for years, meaning recycling cannot immediately replace primary extraction at the scale required by growing global demand.
Its value instead lies in building a second source of material and developing processing expertise within the UK. Recovering rare-earth elements domestically also keeps more of the value chain closer to manufacturers that ultimately consume the refined oxides.
The government has placed greater emphasis on critical-mineral resilience through industrial and supply-chain policy, including support for recycling and magnet capability. Projects such as Ionic Technologies’ proposed Belfast plant align with that objective because they focus on midstream processing rather than relying solely on imported refined material.
The company’s existing demonstration facility gives the proposal a different risk profile from an untested processing concept, although commercial-scale construction still requires planning approval, financing, commissioning, reliable feedstock, and customers for its output.
Belfast also stands to gain a specialist industrial activity linked to technology developed locally. The proposed employment numbers are smaller than those associated with a large conventional manufacturing plant, but the roles sit within a technically specialised supply chain whose strategic value has increased.
Planning is now the immediate hurdle. Belfast City Council must assess the proposed development and its supporting documentation before construction can proceed.
If the project reaches operation, Ionic Technologies would move from demonstrating its process to producing recycled rare-earth oxides at a substantially larger scale. That would give Belfast a more prominent position in a supply chain increasingly shaped by electrification, energy security, and efforts to reduce dependence on highly concentrated sources of critical materials.
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