Last month, the Commerce Department imposed new restrictions on exports of battery and metals waste, effectively banning exports by ordering U.S. sellers of battery black mass and select forms of tungsten waste to offer 100 percent of their monthly sales to domestic buyers first. Coming on the heels of new domestic sales requirements for high-quality copper scrap, Washington has been sending a clear signal: End-of-life products and manufacturing scrap are not waste. They are strategic feedstock, and keeping more of it inside U.S. borders has become a policy priority.
The motivation is appropriate and recycling is referred to as “above-ground mining” for good reason. Americans scrap more than 12 million vehicles and generate 6 to 7 million tons of electronic waste every year. Despite anticipated global shortages of the metal, the United States is the world’s largest exporter of copper scrap. This is a meaningful resource base, and in a world where China controls roughly 85 percent of global battery preprocessing and material-recovery capacity, it makes sense to ask why so much of that material leaves the country when its value could be recovered here.
However, as two experts in mining industry and critical minerals policy, we’d offer a caution to policymakers reaching for export restrictions as the fix. Retaining scrap and recovering minerals are not the same thing. Keeping black mass, tungsten waste, or copper scrap inside our borders will not, in isolation, put another gram of lithium, tungsten powder, or refined copper into an American factory. That only happens if the material can actually move through a viable domestic chain of collection, sorting, refining, and preprocessing. Miss a link in that chain, and restricting exports simply strands the material rather than putting it to use.
Battery recycling is the clearest example. The United States has built meaningful capacity to shred used batteries and lithium-ion manufacturing scrap into “black mass,” the intermediate powder that contains the lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese, graphite, or other materials worth recovering. But we have built far less capacity to take that next step and refine black mass into battery-grade materials. Industry estimates suggest the U.S. accounts for less than 5 percent of global battery preprocessing capacity, and less than 1 percent of material-recovery capacity. If we restrict black mass exports without addressing that second bottleneck, a new domestic lithium supply is not the inevitable outcome. Instead, it creates a stockpile of unusable waste material. However, blanket restrictions can mean that the businesses collecting and preprocessing batteries lose a revenue stream as they can no longer sell to the export customers who used to pay them for it. Thankfully, the current restrictions include a licensing regime to mitigate this outcome—which could harm the nascent battery recycling industry, as well as collectors and dismantlers.
Tungsten offers a cautionary tale because we are watching these challenges unfold in real time. Since late August, certain covered forms of tungsten waste and scrap have been effectively restricted from export, testing whether existing U.S. recycling capacity can absorb material that previously moved through trusted international supply chains. While the United States has a mature tungsten recycling industry, the recycling methods most commonly used domestically do not always produce the intermediates required by strategic downstream applications, including armor-piercing components in munitions, gases used in advanced semiconductor manufacturing, and specialty alloys. Where U.S. capabilities do align with these needs—particularly chemical conversion—facilities are already operating at or near capacity, making continued access to trusted processors in Europe, Asia, and Canada an important source of flexibility while domestic capacity expands.
The challenge playing out live is timing: the export restrictions took effect immediately, but new chemical conversion capacity can take years to develop, and even existing recycling flows through partner countries can take the better part of a year to convert scrap and waste into chemical precursors, semi-finished materials, or finished products and return them to the United States. Western recyclers have announced new chemical conversion investments, but most will not come online until well after the Commerce Department’s restrictions expire next August. Cutting off established flows before replacement capacity is available therefore does not necessarily create a new domestic source of tungsten; it risks disrupting a supply chain that already supports U.S. access.
This is not to make the case that it is never appropriate to ban or restrict the export of recyclable critical minerals—especially in the current era of great power competition between U.S. and allied nations, and the CCP and other adversaries. There will be cases, clearly defined and time-limited, where a targeted measure makes sense, particularly where a foreign competitor’s non-market advantages are actively pulling feedstock away from a domestic industry that could otherwise absorb it. However, our approach must be highly specific: Will this restriction, applied to this material, actually result in more of that mineral being recovered and used here, once you account for every stage material must pass through to get there? A policy that keeps scrap at home while starving the collectors, dismantlers, and preprocessors who supply it of paying customers can actually leave the country worse off than before, with less material flowing into recycling channels at all. Also worryingly, this could be pointed to as a failure that sours policymakers or investors on recycling in general.
We suggest a more holistic approach: pairing any retention measure with real investment in the missing links, whether that’s downstream battery-material refining, chemical conversion recycling capacity for tungsten, or the dismantling infrastructure needed to pull strategic minor minerals out of end-of-life vehicles and electronics before they are lost to the shredder. And if export restrictions are to be part of that holistic toolkit, policymakers first need to get the house in order: Ensuring the right HTS codes are in place and properly enforced, ultimately building the transparency and traceability that our organization, SAFE, has long argued are the backbone of sound minerals policy.
Recycling can and should become a bigger part of how America secures the minerals its economy and its defense industrial base depend on… But this outcome will be built one collection network, one sorting technology, one re-processing facility, at a time. A scrap export restriction will not get us there on its own.
Getting this right is a matter of great consequence for our national security and industrial capability. The mining and metals sector and mineral security advocates like ourselves have spent years making the case that critical mineral security requires patient, capital-intensive investment across the entire supply chain, not shortcuts. Recycling policy deserves the same discipline. If we hold export restrictions to the standard of whether they actually put more recovered material into American hands, rather than simply keeping it inside American borders, we will end up with a stronger domestic industry. If we don’t, we risk mistaking the appearance of security for the real thing.
Tom Albanese is the former CEO of Rio Tinto and Vedanta and serves as Co-Chair of SAFE’s Center for Critical Minerals Strategy. Abigail Hunter is Executive Director of SAFE’s Center for Critical Minerals Strategy.
