The war in Ukraine and the related economic sanctions on Russia have thrown into relief U.S. dependence on unfriendly nations for key, so-called rare earth minerals for use in electronics, including electronic vehicles and defense technology. Lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite (along with other materials) are imported from “unreliable foreign sources,” including Russia, China, and conflict zones in Africa such as Congo. In response to bipartisan pressure, President Joe Biden invoked the rarely used Defense Production Act to encourage domestic mining of such minerals for national security reasons.
The president is right to have done so — but change is likely to be slow in coming, as the permitting of mines is inevitably slow. But local governments do not have to wait on an inefficient and sluggish federal government. They can increase the supply of rare earth and other valuable metals by “mining” their own trash, where those very materials are found and generally sent to landfills and buried.
Virtually every local government in the United States purports to recycle valuable materials in its waste stream. But municipal sanitation departments separate plastic and glass of little resale value while throwing cellphones and other electronics filled with coveted rare earths into incinerators or landfills. E-waste from phones, printers, hard drives, and laptops can contain not only rare earths but platinum, gold, and silver. The economic value of such elements contrasts with the limited markets for universally collected glass and plastic, the costs of which to pick up generally are greater than their resale value. Hence the recent term “wish-cycling” — as some of these materials are not actually reused at all.
The scale of valuable e-waste, filled with the materials the president is concerned about, is significant.
A February 2020 analysis of the e-waste stream finds as many as 56 elements in electronic devices routinely sent to dumps. These include “14 rare earth elements, six platinum group metals, 20 critical metals, and 16 other elements, including some precious metals.” The study also finds that 1 kilogram of mixed e-waste, if separated from the general waste stream, can be worth $168. The resources in a similar amount of hard drives are valued — again, if isolated for recovery — at $454.
This added revenue poses a crucial logistical challenge for municipal public works and sanitation departments: how to separate the valuable parts of the waste stream for sale and reuse. The means of doing so range from a simple expansion of the current curbside recycling system to the unorthodox approach of constructing a new generation of so-called “waste-to-energy” trash incineration systems aimed less at electricity production than residual ash that can be mined for its valuable components.
The Department of Energy has studied such e-waste recycling systems and has begun to invest in them. ARPA-E (Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy) has, for instance, made a $1 million grant to the University of California, Berkeley and the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory for the “biomining of rare earths and other critical metals from electronic wastes,” including “used mobile devices.” The grant envisions bacteria that can isolate the valuable materials.
Let’s hope the Biden plans include more such research — and even grants to major municipalities to build demonstration e-waste recycling facilities. In the meantime, however, the Environmental Protection Agency, which has long been pushing localities to recycle paper, glass, aluminum, and plastic, must expand its focus and grant-making to include e-waste. To date, that has not been the case. Indeed, in its November 2021 National Recycling Plan, the EPA ignored the potential of e-waste entirely.
It is blindly such in a pre-2017 world — that’s the year China announced it was closing its landfills to what it called “foreign trash” — including the “recyclables” shipped from the U.S. In the time since, it’s become more financially sensible to ship the contents of those blue bins to landfills.
Rather than facing up to the fact that it is difficult or impossible to recycle materials for which there’s no market demand, the EPA imagines it will somehow “improve markets for recycled commodities through market development, analysis, manufacturing, and research.”
This is either without real substance or worrisome. One way that “markets” are developed is through government intervention, such as potential recycled material requirements. These measures would divert investment from markets where recycling might actually make financial sense.
The EPA needs, in other words, to get on the same page as the Department of Energy — and begin to support local efforts to “bio mine” the e-waste stream. Someone needs to tell the White House, too.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow for domestic policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute.
