A new environment friendly approach for rare earth separation has been developed in this paper. The approach used rare earth carbonates to control the equilibrium acidity during the rare earth loading with HEH(EHP) in chloride system. The kinetics of rare earth pre-loading by the approach was investigated. High rare earth loading of 0.17 mol L-1 and fast kinetics with about 5 min for equilibrium were achieved, which is suitable to the application of conventional rare earth separation process. The approach is free from environmental pollution because no saponification reagent is introduced. (C) 2013 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.