Scott Dunn and the long way back to an American magnet

The apartment was in Shenyang. The factory time was overnight. Scott Dunn and his collaborators had gone to China to learn how to make rare earth magnets, and the arrangement was unusually literal: use an idle factory after hours, try the process, and discover what a drawing or a patent could not teach them. Before there could be a magnet business in Texas, there had to be people who knew how to run one.

It is a useful place to begin with Dunn, co-founder and CEO of Noveon Magnetics. American manufacturing can sound wonderfully simple when described from a lectern. Bring it home. Build the plant. Secure the supply. On the night shift, the verbs acquire machinery, material tolerances and a rather less accommodating clock.

The team rented an apartment, worked in the factory and returned to the United States after a year. In 2016, Noveon built its American pilot production facility. The commercial operation would take longer. There were years between seeing an opening in the market and becoming a supplier that a motor manufacturer could depend on.

“You just have to go where something is if you really want to be serious about it.”

Scott Dunn, on learning the magnet trade

An education in what gets thrown away

Dunn grew up in Bel Air, Maryland, around his family’s body armor and ballistics business. As a teenager, he was given leftover aluminum alloy and a practical problem: find something to do with it. He later studied at the U.S. Naval Academy before transferring to the University of Southern California to study environmental science. The connection between manufacturing and recovered materials was already there.

After college came energy retrofit work in Los Angeles. Dunn and Peter Afiuny, a former colleague, began recovering valuable metal from old solar thermal water heaters. Their business took them into the international trade in materials, including sales to a copper smelter in the Philippines. At a magnet conference in Nagasaki in 2012, they met Miha Zakotnik and Catalina Oana Tudor. Zakotnik’s recycling research gave the emerging business a different direction.

The company now known as Noveon was co-founded in 2014. Its central question was becoming more demanding: could material recovered from an old magnet become a new magnet that an industrial customer would buy? A useful pile of scrap was only the beginning. Someone still had to manufacture the next component.

A magnet has to earn its place

In a 2022 account of Noveon’s development, Dunn explained that he had built a magnet manufacturing company first, with technology able to use different material inputs. That order matters. It puts the finished product at the center of the business. Recycling becomes a way of feeding production, with the customer’s requirements deciding whether the resulting magnet is useful.

The letters NdFeB stand for neodymium, iron and boron. Noveon makes sintered magnets in this family, supplying components used in motors and other equipment. They are easily overlooked inside a finished product. A customer assembling that product has every reason to pay close attention to them. Small parts can carry rather large responsibilities.

Noveon’s manufacturing model can use both primary and recycled inputs. That flexibility connects Dunn’s conservation interests with his responsibilities as an operator. A business built around recovering materials still needs a steady flow of feedstock. A business selling magnets still needs consistent output. The two tasks have to work together, on a schedule someone else can build around.

By February 2025, that proposition had a five-year binding off-take agreement with Nidec Motor Corporation behind it. The agreement had the potential to cover more than 1,000 tons of finished magnets in total, with deliveries beginning in 2025. It covered uses across automation, industrial and defense applications. The word “total” deserves its place: this was a multi-year agreement, rather than a statement of annual factory output.

A long agreement changes the scale of the obligation. It gives production a destination and puts the supplier into the customer’s future planning. For Dunn, the work moves from demonstrating that a magnet can be made to maintaining the arrangements that allow it to be delivered repeatedly.

The trucks were already waiting

General Motors added another test of the business. In August 2025, Noveon announced a multi-year agreement to supply magnets for components in GM’s full-size SUVs and trucks. Deliveries had begun in July. The agreement supported internal combustion engine vehicle lines, a detail that widens the familiar association between rare earth magnets and electric cars.

Dunn’s customer base reaches into vehicles people already drive and systems that factories already use. The commercial opportunity includes the quieter work of keeping those products supplied. For a new American manufacturer, that means fitting into an existing operation with its own production calendar, purchasing decisions and expectations about quality.

ABB followed with a long-term agreement announced in August 2025 for magnets used in industrial motors. Monthly deliveries were due to begin that month, with a ramp toward supplying all magnet parts used at ABB’s North American motor production facility by the end of 2026. The magnets were engineered for ABB’s high-temperature requirements.

Here the large language of supply chain resilience acquires a specific job description. Motors serve cooling towers, water pumps and building systems. ABB needs material that works in those environments. Dunn’s argument for domestic production must arrive as a component an engineer can specify and a purchasing team can schedule.

The map gets bigger

The raw materials have their own geography. In October 2025, Noveon and Lynas announced a non-binding memorandum of understanding covering a proposed supply chain from separated rare earth oxides through to finished magnets. Definitive agreements still had to be negotiated. For Dunn, the ambition was to connect material supply and manufacturing capability across companies rather than expect one factory to solve every problem.

A November agreement with Solvay addressed another part of that task. Solvay would supply neodymium-praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium oxides beginning in 2026, with material extracted from sources including end-of-life products. The arrangement joins chemistry expertise to magnet production. Even a business devoted to bringing manufacturing home depends on relationships that cross borders.

South Korea became part of the plan too. In November 2025, Noveon and Kangwon Energy signed an MOU for a proposed factory with annual production capacity of 2,000 tons. The announcement expected production to begin in 2027. It was a plan for another manufacturing site, with Korean plant engineering capabilities paired with Noveon’s production and recycling technology.

Then, in January 2026, LG Electronics joined an announced closed-loop initiative with Noveon and Kangwon. Magnets recovered from end-of-life LG products would become new magnets for LG applications. Testing and validation were built into the program. The proposed Korean facility would add capacity as the effort expanded.

That is a particularly exacting version of a second life. The recovered material has to return to a product line and satisfy its requirements. For Dunn, whose early business involved selling recovered metal onward, the circle now reaches further into the customer’s own manufacturing process.

The work also puts Dunn in rooms with the people building the other parts of this industry. The September 2026 Rare Earth Mines, Magnets & Motors conference in Toronto listed him among its keynote speakers and scheduled a one-on-one conversation. The program brought together miners, processors, magnet makers and motor specialists. A factory sits at a fixed address; its ability to keep producing reaches into a much wider network.

Room for the next machine

On January 19, 2026, Noveon announced a $215 million Series C, led by a $200 million investment from One Investment Management. The financing was intended to expand American magnet manufacturing capacity beyond 2,000 tons a year. The transaction also facilitated secondary sales by some existing shareholders. The headline number covered more than new equipment alone.

Dunn oversees strategic planning and capital allocation. At this stage, those responsibilities have a physical expression: how much capacity to add, how it connects to available materials, and which customer commitments it will serve. His public remarks about magnet manufacturing include its expense and the difficulty of correcting course once decisions have been made.

At the San Marcos site, visitors described space and connections for a second piece of equipment beside existing machinery. There was room for another building too. It is an appealingly concrete image of preparation. The next chapter has an allotted patch of floor.

Away from production, Dunn follows the Baltimore Orioles and fishes the Guadalupe River. By June 2024, he and his wife, Dani, had moved to San Marcos to be nearer his work. He has described himself as self-critical, and named listening to his gut and avoiding prolonged decisions as advice he values.

He has taken the same subject to a wider audience, including a CNN conversation with Julia Chatterley and a Sustainability Defined podcast episode. Explaining the business means following an unassuming component back through the products that depend on it. A wind turbine or a washing machine offers a familiar starting point. Behind it comes the less familiar question of where the magnet was made and what materials went into it.

Those convictions sit beside a business that has required years of patience. Dunn can decide to move quickly; a factory still needs to be built, a process learned and a magnet accepted by its buyer. His American manufacturing story began by going overseas to learn. Its next measure will be the work that leaves the factory, fits into someone else’s machine, and gives them reason to order again.