The nation’s need for critical minerals will only continue to grow in the coming years, and some leading e-scrap recyclers say a holistic approach will give the country the best chance to create a more circular mineral-recovery supply chain.
Several industry leaders addressed the issue during the E-Scrap Conference Oct. 26 in New Orleans. They agree the issue needs to be addressed as the nation simultaneously shifts federal policy to bolster domestic supplies and lacks the infrastructure to refine all of the minerals that US companies produce domestically.
Filling industry needs
The first step toward creating mineral independence, speakers said, is for the business community to increase capabilities at every step of the process. Comstock Metals, for one, has worked to improve solar panel recycling by building a market-specific process that retrieves more material, according to Cody Oliver, Comstock’s new director of public policy and government affairs.
His company uses a proprietary “secret sauce” to remove the laminates from panel glass, which contains aluminum, silicon, silver and other minerals that many other recyclers end up discarding because the laminates can’t be processed.
The Comstock process “removes those laminates naturally, turning them into basically water vapor and carbon dioxide,” he said. “That releases everything else after that point and allows us (to extract) really clean metals … and it’s really important that they can stay domestically and go into this supply chain here in America, because they’re so clean.”
That’s similar to the goal of Mint Innovation, a New Zealand-based metal-recovery company that’s building a facility in Longview, Texas. Mint patented a process to capture gold and other metals from circuit boards that have been finely ground, according to Chris York, vice president of business development. The process uses sponge-like bacteria that absorb materials, yielding more minerals while using less energy than other recycling methods, he said.
The Texas facility will have a processing capacity of 4,500 tons of circuit boards per year, he said, about double that of Mint’s Sydney facility. The process has been proven — HP reuses the copper that Mint pulls from circuit boards that HP supplies — and York feels similar closed-loop partnerships can help keep some minerals out of the waste stream entirely.
“It can be a full domestic circular model for anyone’s supply chain,” he said. “We don’t have the processing capabilities here in the US. Our demand is outpacing the supply. So what we’re trying to do is create that sovereign supply chain for those critical minerals out there.”
Innovations such as these have helped meet “historic commercial and national security objectives,” according to Ben Kincaid, CEO of ReElement Technologies Africa, a subsidiary of Indiana-based ReElement Technologies. ReElement licensed separation and purification technology from Purdue University researchers. That chromatographic separation technology retrieves high-purity metals from liquid solutions like solvent extraction does, while requiring fewer chemicals, less water and less infrastructure.
Traditional solvent extraction is largely done by Chinese companies, but technology such as ReElement’s could help US companies more quickly build refining capabilities at scale; where some facilities need two or three years to gain environmental permits in the US to conduct solvent extraction, he said, ReElement’s two Indiana plants were permitted in less than two months.
Government’s role
Working with (and around) government regulations presents a mixed bag as part of the attempted infrastructure buildup, panelists said. As one example, extended producer responsibility (EPR) is necessary in a lot of ways but can also complicate matters, Oliver said. A state solar panel law in Washington resulted in five manufacturers opting not to do business there rather than comply, which he said clearly contradicts the law’s intent; a similar local EPR law in Niagara County, New York, drew comparable blowback.
Even when recycling laws exist, such as the solar panel recycling law in New Jersey, a lack of cohesion can dull their impact. In New Jersey’s case, legal challenges have resulted in panels either sitting in storage or going to hazardous waste landfills as legislators try to determine what will actually move forward.
Oliver hopes more exposure to regulatory compliance and collaboration will help turn around companies’ attitudes and help legislators meet the needs of both constituents and businesses.
Panel recycling “really falls in the same line that I think e-waste has gone in the EPR process: ‘There’s no way I can do this, right? This is going to be terrible,’ ” Oliver said. “I think we need a lot of advocates in this space to say, ‘Hey, we’ve done it before. We can do it again.’ ”
More recovery, more recycling
One way the government can help is by helping boost e-scrap recovery, York said.
“We’re only collecting 15% of what’s produced today anyway,” he said. “So we still have a long way to go regardless of EPR.”
That’s tough, according to Oliver, when the e-scrap industry’s main competitors are the very landfills from which companies are trying to divert materials. Government can help keep products in circulation by passing more regulation around what can legally be dumped, but he said ensuring safe, cost-effective channels to keep products in circulation will only encourage more companies to do so.
Companies can help themselves
Manufacturers can take other steps to improve mineral circularity, panelists said, whether designing products for reuse, engineering devices to work with fewer critical minerals or learning how to get creative on the floor. Kincaid, for one, said ReElement has figured out how to repurpose the columns it uses in its processing for different mineral feedstocks.
“Having technology that’s adaptable and flexible, especially in volatile commodity cycles and with all the changes that we’re going through, it’s important,” he said.
Kincaid and York agreed building up more domestic infrastructure will help fuel US mineral supply chains. More American refineries like Mint’s will speed up the manufacturing process, York said, as companies won’t have to wait for materials to go to and from Asia or Europe to get the minerals back into their plants.
Building up capabilities in the US will also help bring more cohesion to a process that Kincaid said involves thousands of ITAD companies, many of which operate in differing ways that only add confusion to the circularity process.
“It’s a very decentralized, fragmented space,” he said. “There’s not a coherent way of doing things to feed things into a funnel to get the volumes that are needed.”
That’s where collaboration and conversation will help fill gaps in supply, processing capacity and many other problem areas across the industry, Kincaid said. There are a lot of companies like his that need more feedstock, and probably just as many looking to offload materials. So bringing everyone together will strengthen those individual parts and, ultimately, help close the mineral loop.
“Are there ways that people can partner with you to help you collect some of those rare earths from their areas throughout the country strategically?” he said. “Aggregation at scale, even with some of the biggest ITAD companies in the world, is not something that’s been figured out yet.”
