Over the past 15 years, it has often been said that China has a stranglehold on global supplies of rare earths, the 17 naturally occurring elements whose magnetic, conductive or optical properties make many modern technologies possible.
China’s grip on rare earths is sometimes compared with that of the OPEC cartel, an analogy that raises fears that Beijing could restrict exports the way OPEC can — potentially halting global technology production, hampering U.S. industries and cutting America off from technology components needed by its defense sector.
This narrative not only exaggerates the notion of the scarcity of rare earths and U.S. dependence on China — it is also warping both U.S. foreign policy and industrial strategy.
In October, President Trump backed down in his trade war with China over fears that Beijing would cut off rare-earths exports. American policymakers and industry leaders are pushing to counter China’s dominance by diversifying supply sources, including ramping up mining both in the United States and abroad — an expensive approach that is slow to yield results and environmentally risky. And the Trump administration has long cited Greenland’s rare-earths potential as one reason for its provocative push to acquire the island.
China does have the world’s largest reserves of rare earths, and it mines more of them than any other nation. But that does not mean it has a monopoly on geological supplies of these and other critical minerals. The United States has plentiful reserves of its own, both in the ground and hiding in plain sight in mine waste, industrial scrap and discarded electronics. Rather than rushing to open new mines or making policy based on the assumption that China holds all the cards, America could go a long way toward meeting its growing demand for such minerals by harvesting those readily available sources.
Despite their name, which derives from an archaic 18th-century term, rare earths are abundant across the planet. The specter of a Chinese monopoly on a scarce resource took hold in 2010, when customs officials at several Chinese ports delayed routine shipments of rare-earth elements to Japan over a territorial dispute. The impasse lasted only a few weeks, but helped embed the current narrative.
To be clear, China does dominate the processing of rare earths — the complex transformation of piles of rock into the refined materials needed for smartphones, cancer treatments, rocket parts and weapons systems. China built this commanding position over the past few decades by investing heavily in this and other polluting industries, a strategy made possible by the country’s relatively lax environmental and labor protections.
Western nations went the other way, outsourcing hazardous industries such as rare-earths processing to China and cutting back on research that eventually eroded their own scientific and industrial capacities.
But Chinese control of this part of the supply chain, however important, does not equal unchecked power. China’s rare-earths industry operates within a deeply interconnected global system and is just as dependent on world markets as those markets are on China. It needs imported raw materials that feed its rare-earths processing sector, and the country relies on foreign demand for its rare earths and for the finished products that contain them. This interdependence is why, despite occasional threats, China has yet to carry out a full rare-earths export embargo: It would shoot the Chinese economy in the foot.
The global scramble for new mines to counter Chinese dominance actually plays into Beijing’s longstanding strategy to shift the environmental burden of mining abroad and import more rare earths than it extracts at home, a threshold that China crossed in 2018 for the first time since the 1980s.
Opening a viable rare-earth mine is difficult. Besides the environmental hazards, returns are low largely because it’s difficult to compete with China’s state-backed mining companies. Mines can take years before becoming productive. Since 2010, hundreds of projects across the globe have been proposed only to be quietly shelved — or in some cases sold to China — because of the challenges. Still, periodic hype over potential rare-earths bonanzas in Greenland, Afghanistan, North Korea, the seabed and even outer space keeps the focus on mining.
This fixation ignores the industry’s dirty little secret: It is tremendously wasteful. Studies of China’s rare-earths mines have found that between 50 percent and 70 percent of mined rare earths are cast off as waste before ever reaching final production. The United States has immense quantities of rare earths and other critical minerals sitting in thousands of mining waste sites. And here and elsewhere, huge amounts are discarded every year in retired passenger jets, decommissioned ships and obsolete electronics, where they are embedded in metal alloys, the frames of planes, the hulls of ships, and in wiring, batteries, magnets, circuit boards and other components. Recovery of waste minerals is getting more attention these days, but still less than 1 percent of the rare earths consumed globally are recycled.
The real threat to a secure and sustainable supply of rare earths and other critical minerals is not that they are scarce or monopolized by one nation, but simply that so much is thrown away. This is an opportunity for the United States. A study last year from researchers at the Colorado School of Mines found that America could meet most of its domestic critical mineral needs — including rare earths — for the foreseeable future just by recovering the valuable materials languishing in mining waste across the country.
Wastefulness and scarcity feed each other, with serious consequences in places like Southeast Asia, especially war-torn Myanmar, where armed groups and militias chase fabled rare-earth riches — intensifying conflict, degrading ecosystems and driving social breakdown in the process. Opening more mines could worsen such problems and lead to more waste while doing little to secure U.S. supplies.
The United States absolutely should increase production at its existing mines. But major new investments should go not into opening more mines but into building the domestic capacity for processing critical minerals that was long ago ceded to China, while blazing a new trail in recycling rare earths and other critical minerals. This could lower prices for rare earths, ease environmental pressure and help clean up metal-rich pollution in communities in the United States and abroad.
All countries have a shared interest in where this leads: a more sustainable and secure rare- earth supply chain that is less dependent on China.
Dr. Julie Michelle Klinger is a geographer, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and the author of “Rare Earth Frontiers: From Terrestrial Subsoils to Lunar Landscapes.”
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