Editor’s note: Electronics recycling will be featured in sessions at the 2026 E-Scrap: The Longevity Conference in New Orleans October 26-28.
The International Energy Agency’s (IEA) Global Critical Minerals Outlook 2026 projects that secondary supply of key energy-transition minerals could roughly double its share of global demand by 2040, with average recycling rates climbing from about 10% today to close to 20%. The finding, buried inside a report focused mainly on mining and refining capacity, carries direct implications for the battery, rare earth magnet and electronics recycling sectors that increasingly compete with primary producers for the same feedstocks.
The IEA’s base-case scenario, known as the Stated Policies Scenario, shows recycling maturity varying widely by material. Cobalt and copper already have relatively established recovery streams, with current rates of about 16% and 10%, respectively, the latter figure excluding direct reuse of copper scrap. Those rates are expected to rise to roughly 25% for cobalt and 20% for copper by 2040, driven by improvements in collection, sorting and processing systems rather than any single technological breakthrough.
Lithium presents the outlook’s most dramatic recycling trajectory. Secondary lithium production is projected to reach around 250,000 tons by 2050, a 25-fold increase over current volumes, as larger quantities of end-of-life batteries enter the waste stream and processing capacity catches up. Under the IEA’s higher-demand scenario, that figure could climb to about 560,000 tons. Even so, the agency is careful to note that recycling growth on this scale would not eliminate the need for new mining investment; it would ease pressure on primary supply and improve security rather than replace extraction outright.
That caveat matters for how battery recyclers frame their own growth expectations. Processors positioning themselves purely as substitutes for mining risk overstating their near-term role. The more defensible pitch, grounded in the IEA’s own numbers, is one of margin expansion for producers who can secure feedstock now, ahead of the wave of end-of-life electric vehicle and grid-storage batteries the report says is still building.
Capacity concentration remains a structural risk. China accounts for more than three-quarters of global battery pre-treatment capacity and 90% of material recovery capacity, according to the report, with Korea currently the leading processor outside China. For North American and European recyclers, that concentration looks less like a competitive threat and more like a policy opening. Trade restrictions on minerals and processing equipment, a recurring theme elsewhere in the report, tend to accelerate government interest in domestic recycling infrastructure as a hedge against supply concentration.
Rare earth magnet recycling is described as earlier-stage but gathering momentum. Today’s supply comes mostly from manufacturing scrap rather than end-of-life recovery, but the report points to the retirement of early-generation electric vehicles and wind turbines as a coming source of recyclable magnet material. Recent industry activity bears that out: the report cites a new recycling line at the Mountain Pass facility built to reprocess end-of-life products and scrap, alongside separate ventures by Neo Performance Materials and Cyclic Materials, Korea Zinc and Alta Resource Technologies, and ReElement Technologies, all aimed at building closed-loop neodymium-iron-boron magnet supply chains.
Policy is moving in parallel. The European Union’s Critical Raw Materials Act includes rare earth recycled-content obligations phasing in between 2028 and 2032, and India has set aside roughly EUR 145 million ($166 million) to subsidize recycling capacity for critical minerals recovered from secondary sources.
Notably absent from the report is any direct discussion of electronics recycling or solar panel end-of-life recovery as distinct categories. The IEA’s recycling analysis is organized around energy-transition minerals recovered chiefly from EVs, wind turbines and battery scrap, not from IT hardware or photovoltaic modules specifically. That omission is itself informative for the electronics and solar recycling industries: it suggests these waste streams are not yet large or standardized enough to register as their own line item in a major mineral-supply forecast, even as the underlying metals, cobalt, copper, silver and rare earth elements, are shared inputs across batteries, EVs, wind turbines, solar modules and consumer electronics alike.
That gap points to an analytical opening rather than a settled conclusion. As silver loading in solar cells and copper intensity in EVs continue to shift with changing cell architectures, a case can be made that PV and electronics recyclers will increasingly be competing with battery recyclers for the same recovered metals, particularly silver and copper, rather than operating in separate markets.
Whether that competition intensifies before 2030, when the IEA expects the first major wave of end-of-life EV batteries to hit recycling infrastructure, remains a question the report leaves open, and one worth watching as recycled-content mandates in Europe and elsewhere begin taking effect later this decade.
