Highlights

• Urban mining advocates portray cities as mineral vaults, but extraction of rare earths from devices is technically difficult, economically marginal, and yields only microgram quantities—with less than 1% globally recycled.
• U.S. recycling infrastructure is actually shrinking: commodity prices crush municipal programs, e-waste collection stagnates, and pyro-smelting destroys rare earths instead of reclaiming them.
• Circularity is essential but supplemental—even perfect recycling of all U.S. devices cannot meet domestic demand for electrification, making primary mines and refineries indispensable for supply chain security.

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So the gospel of circularity meets the reality of declining recycling rates.

Urban mining is having a moment. Advocates portray cities as untapped mineral vaults filled with rare earths, battery metals, aluminum, and steel waiting to be liberated from rooftops, server racks, and junk drawers.

The narrative is compelling, almost intoxicating: America doesn’t need new mines, just new imagination. But before we crown discarded gadgets as the salvation of Western supply-chain security, a sobering question needs to be asked: If urban mining is so valuable, why is recycling in multiple U.S. sectors actually declining?

Mythic Abundance vs. Macro-Scale Scarcity

Yes, urban mining is real. Yes, rare earths are hiding in smartphones, HDD drives, appliances, and solar panels. And yes, companies like Buckstop are attempting meaningful innovation—algorithmic assays, asset inventories, and reuse modeling. We fully support them and others.   Yes Rare Earth Exchanges (REEx) very much supports the advancement of more circular supply chains. We have interviewed numerous impressive entrepreneurs on the podcast (opens in a new tab), making substantial investments in this space, from America to India.

Excessive cheerleading glosses over a core constraint: those metals exist in microgram or milligram quantities per device. Extracting them is technically difficult, economically marginal, and often dirtier than policymakers care to admit.

The romantic notion of a “materials bank we refuse to cash in” ignores that cashing it in requires enormous logistical networks, pre-sorted feeds, solvent-heavy processing steps, and break-even economics that rarely materialize. Globally, less than 1% of rare earth elements are recycled, and not because no one has heard of circularity—because physics, pricing, and process complexity still dominate.

The Missing Truth: Circularity Isn’t Replacing Mining Anytime Soon

Circular economies are essential for national security, resilience, and waste reduction. Again, REEx strongly supports them. But various advocacy journalism treating urban mining as a strategic alternative to primary supply is a risky overreach. Urban mining is supplemental, not sovereign. Even if every solar panel, magnet, and EV battery in America were perfectly recycled, the recovered tonnage would not meet domestic demand for the electrification decade ahead.

Meanwhile, critical parts of U.S. recycling infrastructure are shrinking. Commodity prices have crushed municipal recycling programs. E-waste collection rates stagnate. OEM-controlled takeback programs often prioritize destruction over recovery. And pyro-smelting—rebranded as “recycling”—still dominates, destroying rare earths instead of reclaiming them.

Where the Argument Succeeds—and Where It Strays into Sermonizing

Yes, urban mining matters. And yes, it deserves applause for exposing the waste, warped vendor incentives, and regulatory torpor that keep valuable materials drifting toward landfills instead of supply chains. But some narratives we review slip from strategy into sermon when they suggest that urban mining alone can redeem decades of Western upstream atrophy.

No amount of dusting out junk drawers or stripping solar fields will substitute for the hard, unglamorous work of rebuilding mines, refineries, and industrial-scale magnet plants, not to mention reconfigured onshore or nearshore supply chain systems and processes. Urban mining will not close America’s rare earth deficit next year, and it won’t close it in the next decade.

Yes circularity is essential—indispensable, even. But it is not the cathedral; it is one pillar in the architecture. Without primary production and domestic refining standing beside it, the whole structure still collapses.

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