At the end of March, it emerged that the Trump administration was making a new push for Ukraine’s natural resources, including its now famous rare earths. It’s no surprise that the United States wants access to the precious commodity, since relying on the world’s top processor, China, is hardly sustainable. But very little is known about Ukraine’s actual rare-earth deposits, and a large part of them sit in Russian-occupied territories. Building the infrastructure for extraction would take years—and require peace first.
Here’s a better idea, one that would make the United States dependent on no one and create jobs at home (not to mention do a good deed for the environment): recycle rare earths in Americans’ used gadgets.
At the end of March, it emerged that the Trump administration was making a new push for Ukraine’s natural resources, including its now famous rare earths. It’s no surprise that the United States wants access to the precious commodity, since relying on the world’s top processor, China, is hardly sustainable. But very little is known about Ukraine’s actual rare-earth deposits, and a large part of them sit in Russian-occupied territories. Building the infrastructure for extraction would take years—and require peace first.
Here’s a better idea, one that would make the United States dependent on no one and create jobs at home (not to mention do a good deed for the environment): recycle rare earths in Americans’ used gadgets.
On March 23, the Trump administration sent Ukraine a proposal on its natural resources that went far beyond the draft agreement on which the two sides agreed in February, the Financial Times reports. The draft agreement, the Times explains, “would apply to all mineral resources, including oil and gas, and major energy assets across the entire Ukrainian territory.”
It also marks the latest salvo in U.S. President Donald Trump’s long-standing quest for Ukraine’s supposed rare-earth riches. “I told them [Ukraine] that I want the equivalent of like $500 billion worth of rare earth, and they’ve essentially agreed to do that. So at least we don’t feel stupid,” Trump told Fox News on Feb. 10.
Ukraine’s rare earths are the core of the natural resources agreement Trump has been pushing President Volodymyr Zelensky to sign. A softer version of the now proposed deal was supposed to have been signed during Zelensky’s visit to Washington in February, but it was derailed by the acrimonious meeting between the two sides.
And now Washington has upped the ante with a proposed agreement that covers the entirety of Ukrainian natural resources and would send revenues directly abroad, with the United States receiving royalties before Ukraine, the Times notes. The deal, which also foresees a U.S.-majority board, would effectively give Washington ownership of Ukraine’s rare earths.
Getting the minerals out of the Ukrainian rock would, alas, be extremely difficult. Three of Ukraine’s four major rare-earth deposits are within or near Russian-controlled areas, as Erik Jonsson, a senior geologist with the Geological Survey of Sweden, told IEEE Spectrum, a journal published by the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers.
There’s also the matter of how large the deposits actually are. “The numbers are believed to come from Soviet surveys dating as far back as the 1960s,” Spectrum notes. Rare earths are notoriously difficult to mine because they appear in tiny quantities within larger pieces of rock, making the commercial aspect of any deal highly sketchy. Spectrum concludes, in italics to emphasize the fact, that “there are no deposits of rare-earth ore in Ukraine known to be minable in an economically viable way.”
For years, the United States has tried to solve its increasingly painful dependence on rare-earth imports, which it needs mainly for electronics, from smartphones to F-35s. (An F-35 needs 920 pounds of rare earths.) Though rare earths are mined in different countries, usually African ones, nearly 90 percent are processed in China, which during globalization’s heyday was not a problem. Now, though, it is.
Since 2020, China has blocked exports of graphite—which is, like rare earths, a crucial component of electric vehicle batteries, though it doesn’t belong to the rare-earth group—to Sweden, where lithium-ion firm Northvolt had been trying to jump-start European EV-battery production before declaring bankruptcy last month. China has also threatened to withhold rare earths from Lockheed Martin, the U.S. maker of the F-35, and is imposing a wide range of controls in response to Trump’s trade war.
The U.S. government must reduce America’s dependence on China. But restoring U.S. industrial chains is a long and painful process that can’t be conjured up overnight. In 2022, the Biden administration awarded $35 million for rare-earth processing to MP Materials, whose mine in Mountain Pass, California, is the United States’ only scaled site.
Over many years, Australian miner Syrah Resources has also received several hundred millions of dollars in U.S. government loans and grants to mine rare earths and graphite in Mozambique, including $165 million in January. Syrah also built a processing plant in Louisiana for its graphite. But as soon as Syrah’s mining of graphite in Mozambique seemed to take off, China flooded the market with lower-priced specimens, the Wall Street Journal notes. It was hardly a subtle signal from Beijing.
But there’s another way for Trump to get the United States the rare earths it needs—and this way would not involve forcing a deal on a savaged country or finding exemptions to global tariffs. In fact, it would involve no country other than the United States. It would even aid the environment, which ought to matter now that the world is approaching the climate change point of no return.
That better way is recycling. Electronics waste is growing rapidly because we all have more electronic gadgets, which we replace increasingly often. In 2022, the latest year available, the world discarded e-waste containing 31 million metric tons of metals, 17 million tons of plastics, and 14 million tons of minerals, glass, and other reusable materials. But only an estimated 19 million tons was recycled—mainly “metals like iron which is present in high quantities and has high recycling rates in almost all e-waste management routes,” the Global E-Waste Monitor, a partnership between the International Telecommunication Union and the United Nations, reports.
The United States throws away nearly 7 million tons of e-waste each year, and as elsewhere, only the easiest parts, such as iron, are recycled. That’s doubly wasteful because discarded gadgets often end up in landfills, where they can poison soil and water—and because they contain the very rare-earth metals that are so desperately needed in new electronic gadgets.
If the United States could marshal the rare earths sitting around in people’s homes and garbage cans, it could slash its dependence on China and create jobs at home. What’s more, it wouldn’t need to impose a rare-earth arrangement on Ukraine, and it would help rid U.S. communities of toxins seeping out from landfills.
Recycling rare-earth metals is extremely difficult and thus commercially unattractive, which is why it’s not yet being done on a large scale. That’s because rare earths are often used in extremely small quantities; while some EV batteries use many pounds’ worth of rare earths, the combined rare earths in a smartphone typically weigh no more than 2 grams. Most other electronics fit somewhere in between. And each rare earth has to be extracted separately.
But getting rare earths out of retired gadgets ought to be no harder than getting them out of remote and unexplored rock in Ukraine. Three days before leaving office, the Biden administration awarded $5.1 million to REEcycle, a small Houston-based recycling company, to help restart a demonstration facility and “advance commissioning of a commercial facility with an estimated annual production of 50 tons of rare earth oxides.” REEcycle specializes in recycling four rare earths commonly used in aircraft, missiles, submarines, and unpiloted vehicles. (The grant, if not yet paid, may have been canceled by DOGE, but DOGE.gov contains no such update.)
There is, in fact, a massive opportunity in rare-earth recycling. Turbocharging U.S. efforts to recover rare earths would trigger more research and development and more innovation at home, and it would help the United states reduce its dangerous rare-earth dependence on China in a way that harms no other country—and creates a variety of new jobs at home. Once scientists and businesses have developed a commercially viable way of recycling rare earths, the United States could reuse these versatile metals over and over. That’s surely a deal Trump should like. In fact, I can’t think of a reason any American would dislike it.
The post America Should Recycle Its Own Rare Earths, Not Grab Ukraine’s appeared first on Foreign Policy.
