Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden are undertaking a systematic effort to map the country’s rare-earth mineral deposits, an initiative that could position Sweden as a meaningful alternative source of the elements that underpin magnets used in electric vehicles, wind turbines, and a wide range of other green technologies. The project, part of Uppsala’s “Sustainable materials and material flows” research area, is led by Martin Sahlberg, Professor of Materials Chemistry, and takes a markedly different approach from conventional rare-earth mining.
Rather than extracting a single target metal from a deposit and treating everything else as waste, as has historically been standard practice, Sahlberg’s team is cataloguing the full chemical inventory of Swedish mineral deposits, describing the process as being “a bit like the TV show ‘What’s in Your Fridge.'” The idea is to design new magnets whose chemical composition closely mirrors what is naturally present in a given deposit, an approach the researchers say could reduce the amount of processing required and lower the environmental footprint of both purification and manufacturing, two stages of rare-earth production that are typically among the most polluting.
Sweden’s geological advantages are considerable. Deposits have already been identified at Kiruna, Bergslagen, and Norra Kärr near Gränna. The most significant of these is the Per Geijer deposit, located adjacent to state-owned mining company LKAB’s existing Kiruna mine, which the company has described as Europe’s largest known rare-earth deposit, containing more than 1.3 million tonnes of rare-earth oxides. “In Sweden our possibilities for extracting REE, even when compared internationally, are relatively good,” Sahlberg has said, pointing to the country’s combination of mineral resources, access to water, and comparatively cheap energy, alongside a strong domestic interest in leading the green transition.
The stakes attached to this research extend well beyond Sweden’s borders. China currently controls close to the entirety of global rare-earth mining and refining capacity, and is estimated to account for roughly 92 percent of the world’s sintered neodymium-iron-boron magnet manufacturing, the magnets that power electric-vehicle motors and wind-turbine generators. That dominance has repeatedly given Beijing significant leverage in trade disputes with Washington and other governments through the use of export controls on rare-earth materials. On 23 July 2026, the Swedish government formally declared the mining of critical metals and rare-earth minerals a matter of national security interest, announcing a new mining strategy explicitly aimed at reducing the country’s, and by extension Europe’s, dependence on Chinese supply.
Even so, industry analysts caution that Sweden’s rare-earth ambitions are unlikely to meaningfully dent China’s global dominance for a considerable period. Turning a mapped ore deposit into a functioning, profitable, and environmentally sound mining and magnet-manufacturing operation is a multi-year undertaking at minimum; LKAB’s own chief executive has acknowledged that it will take several years simply to investigate the Per Geijer deposit and assess the conditions needed to mine it sustainably. The Uppsala research project itself is expected to run for many years as it builds out its inventory of Swedish deposits and develops corresponding magnet formulations. The broader lesson researchers draw from the Swedish case is that rare-earth elements are, despite their name, not especially rare in absolute terms; the genuine bottleneck lies in finding deposits concentrated enough to mine economically and then separating the individual elements without creating fresh environmental problems in the process, precisely the two challenges the Uppsala approach is designed to address simultaneously.
– Sai Chaitanya Puligadda
