From Coal Ash to Optics Scrap, Germanium's Supply Fight Is Turning Circular

Highlights

• China leads global germanium supply through vertically integrated coal-ash recovery, zinc refining, and downstream manufacturing, controlling roughly 74% of global refining capacity.
• The U.S. Defense Logistics Agency's domestic recycling program recovers germanium from military optics and fiber waste, yielding an estimated 2.2 to 3.0 tonnes per year.
• Europe's Umicore sources over half its germanium feed from recycling and received EU Strategic Project status in 2025 for its GePETO circular germanium initiative.
• Old scrap recovery from end-of-life consumer products remains below 1% globally due to germanium's dispersion across fiber optics, solar cells, and infrared lenses.
• Factory scrap and industrial waste streams represent the most credible near-term source of incremental non-Chinese germanium supply, not post-consumer collection.

Germanium is the definition of a by-product metal. It is rarely mined on its own and is instead recovered mainly from zinc residues, with additional output from coal and lignite ash and from scrap streams. That matters because germanium is embedded in fiber-optic glass, infrared optics, semiconductors, satellite solar cells, and radiation detectors. Per the United States Geological Survey (USGS), China remained the leading global producer and exporter in 2025 (opens in a new tab), so any serious discussion of recycling quickly becomes a discussion about supply-chain power.

China’s Coal-Waste Push

China’s latest move is to treat coal waste itself as feedstock. Reporting on a China Energy News interview with Chinese Academy of Sciences (opens in a new tab) member Dai Shifeng (opens in a new tab), the South China Morning Post reported (opens in a new tab) China is already recovering lithium, gallium, germanium, and aluminum from coal gangue and fly ash, aided by integrated coal-washing, chemical-processing, and power-generation infrastructure. The main technical problem is consistency: when plants blend coal from different sources, the chemistry of fly ash shifts, making extraction harder to standardize.

What China Already Does

A 2025 Tsinghua University-led paper (opens in a new tab), “Uncovering the germanium sustainability up to 2050 in China,” authored by Meiion Wong, Jinhui Li, and Xianlai Zeng presents one of the most detailed substance-flow analyses yet of China’s germanium ecosystem. The study found that China’s 2019 germanium supply came primarily from three sources: germanium-bearing coal ash (~113 tonnes), zinc refinery residues (~53 tonnes), and recycling/new scrap (~19 tonnes), confirming that coal ash represented the dominant feedstock source in China’s system at the time. Importantly, the paper also emphasizes that China’s germanium industry is vertically integrated across upstream extraction, midstream refining, and downstream manufacturing, helping explain why the country remains globally dominant in refined germanium and germanium-bearing products.

Importantly, the study notes that “old scrap” recovery from end-of-life products remains extremely limited—generally less than 1% globally—because germanium is highly dispersed in products such as fiber optics, PET catalysts, infrared optics, and solar applications, making recovery technically and economically difficult.

Rare Earth Exchanges™ stresses the idea that China’s “coal-ash strategy” is less about classic consumer recycling and more about industrial waste-to-feedstock recovery embedded inside an already dominant refining and manufacturing ecosystem. Again, herein we explicitly distinguish between highly efficient recycling of “new scrap” generated during manufacturing versus the still-underdeveloped recovery of “old scrap” from discarded products.

Rare Earth Exchanges reiterates the broader strategic point that China’s advantage is not simply geological endowment, but integrated industrial control spanning zinc refining, coal-ash recovery, processing, fabrication, exports, and increasingly high-value downstream germanium products such as infrared optics and fiber-optic materials.

Note the European Union Institute for Security Studies (opens in a new tab) (ISS) estimates of China holding roughly 74% of global germanium refining in 2024.

The U.S. Response

The United States is moving, but mostly through narrow, high-value loops. According to a USGS report (opens in a new tab), U.S. recycling already recovers new and old scrap from infrared-optics machining, decommissioned military lenses and windows, optical-fiber production waste, and solar-cell wafers. The Defense Logistics Agency (opens in a new tab) said its domestic recycling program (opens in a new tab) should yield 2.2 to 3.0 tonnes per year, nearly 10% of 2020 U.S. demand.

Two key individuals for American national germanium resilience include Nancy Albertson, DLA Strategic Materials, and Don Helle, the Research & Development program manager for DLA Disposition Services. In a recent series, the duo stress material reclamation (opens in a new tab) and how such initiatives help secure vital supply chains against global vulnerabilities.

While the United States is increasingly focused on recovering germanium, gallium, and rare earth elements from coal ash, lignite, and other mining waste streams, the sector remains largely in the pilot and conceptual development stage rather than full commercial deployment. The U.S. Department of Energy (opens in a new tab) (DOE) and National Energy Technology Laboratory (opens in a new tab) (NETL) are funding multiple projects aimed at extracting and purifying these critical minerals from coal-derived materials, including efforts led by the University of North Dakota and Microbeam Technologies.

Federal initiatives increasingly frame these efforts as part of a broader national-security and supply-chain resilience strategy, particularly given America’s heavy dependence on China for refined gallium and germanium. Pilot technologies such as NETL’s Targeted Rare Earth Extraction (TREE) process (opens in a new tab) have advanced from laboratory testing to engineering-scale prototype operations, including work at the Wyoming Innovation Center. However, despite technical progress, the United States still lacks large-scale commercial infrastructure capable of economically recovering these materials at industrial volumes. At present, coal ash and lignite recovery remains more an emerging strategic opportunity and alternative feedstock concept than a mature, fully operational domestic supply chain.

Europe and Asia Ex-China

Europe has the clearest commercial circular push. Umicore (opens in a new tab) says more than half of its germanium feed comes from recycling and that it recycles germanium in Belgium and the United States; Brussels also designated Umicore’s GePETO project (opens in a new tab) as a Strategic Project in 2025. The EU is funding industrial-waste recovery work through Eco-Metalophosphore (opens in a new tab), which aims to scale indium-gallium-germanium recovery to 500 liters per day, while the European Space Agency (ESA) and Germany-based Azur Space (opens in a new tab) report 80% germanium recovery from solar-cell backgrinding. Japan’s DOWA (opens in a new tab) still operates germanium production-and-recycling capacity in Akita, and the South Korea Institute of Geoscience and Mineral Resources (KIGAM) is developing gallium/germanium recovery from e-waste and smelting by-products.

What This Means

The key takeaway seems simple enough: recycled germanium will not quickly unseat China, but it is the fastest realistic source of incremental non-Chinese supply. Germanium is already concentrated in residues, ash, optics scrap, fiber waste, and process scrap; the hard part is not finding atoms, but capturing and refining them into GeO2, GeCl4, wafers, and optics-grade material at scale. For now, the most credible circular gains come from factory scrap and industrial wastes, not from waiting for broad post-consumer collection to mature.