The Critical Minerals America Needs Are in Your Junk Drawer

0 Share Newsweek is a Trust Project member See more of our trusted coverage when you search. Prefer Newsweek on Google to see more of our trusted coverage when you search. America’s demand for critical materials has reached a definitive tipping point. Recently, the urgency finally became official policy.

Signed on July 20, 2026, Executive Order 14415 made clear that the United States can no longer tolerate supply chains exposed to physical disruption, cyber threats, economic coercion, or dependence on geopolitical adversaries. Beginning January 1, 2027, the Department of War will sharply restrict waivers for the acquisition of certain adversary-sourced materials, while defense and commercial aerospace contractors will face new requirements to trace components, software, and materials back to their raw-material origins.

This order plainly recognizes that national security and commercial stability depend on “not only the finished equipment deployed by our military, but also the critical materials and components necessary to manufacture, maintain, sustain, and repair that equipment.”

We are now rebuilding shipyards and commercial aerospace production lines that we had allowed to atrophy for decades. Yet every part of that effort, from the data centers powering artificial intelligence to nuclear submarines and commercial satellites, still depends on materials we purchase from strategic rivals.

This could easily be a losing proposition. But America is not empty-handed. As it turns out, we are discarding the very materials our security, commercial sector, and industrial future require. At Senator Dave McCormick’s recent Defense and Innovation Summit, Jamie Dimon described America’s industrial resurgence as the reignition of its “arsenal of democracy,” as JPMorgan announced a $24 million package supporting maritime businesses and workforce development. The message was clear: American military strength is inseparable from American economic strength, and both are essential to sustaining a free and democratic world.

In the 21st century, the means of production include not only factories, capital, and labor, but also the copper, rare earths, and other critical materials without which nothing advanced can be built. No nation can remain economically strong, technologically competitive, or militarily secure if it does not control the material foundations of its future.

An arsenal cannot be built on capital, labor, and ambition alone. It requires physical materials. Similarly, artificial intelligence, while remarkable at almost all tasks, cannot produce raw materials. Software scales on command, but minerals must still be found, extracted, recovered, and refined.

This brings us to a hard truth and an extraordinary opportunity.

Somewhere in your home or office is a drawer or storage room you likely avoid. It holds cracked phones, tangled mystery cords, and old tablets or laptops that you keep “just in case.” While the world looks toward the horizon for our industrial future, we are sitting on the very materials needed to build it: old, unused devices contain the copper, aluminum, gold, silver, palladium, and rare earth elements essential to the NVIDIA and SpaceX economy and broader commercial defense and aerospace economies. What we once considered trash is actually a bona fide national treasure.

The United States continues to rely on vulnerable foreign supply chains for the minerals needed to power artificial intelligence, advanced commercial manufacturing, the energy transition, and national defense. China accounts for roughly 90 percent of global rare earth refining and is the leading refiner for 19 of 20 strategic minerals. When Beijing restricted exports in 2025, production lines from automobiles to consumer electronics felt the shock almost immediately.

While rebuilding American mines is essential, mining alone cannot meet the soaring demand for critical minerals, nor can America afford to wait decades for new production. Recovering valuable materials from obsolete electronics offers the fastest way to supplement domestic mining, strengthen supply chains, and reduce dependence on strategic rivals.

Without these critical materials, the rest of the industrial and commercial revival remains only ambition.

Working in electronics recycling has made one reality impossible to ignore. We process more than a million pounds of electronic devices every day at ERI, yet far too many obsolete electronics still never enter the recycling stream. Technology continues to improve our ability to recover critical minerals safely and efficiently, but that progress means little if the devices themselves are never collected.

One of the biggest obstacles remains public concern over data security. Building trust in secure data destruction is just as important as advancing recovery technologies if we want more electronics recycled responsibly.

That challenge is reflected globally. Approximately 62 million tonnes of e-waste were generated in 2022, yet only about 22 percent is responsibly recycled. The rest represents a growing loss of valuable materials that America can no longer afford to waste.

America now needs bold policymakers to enact what I call a “Green Fence,” a law or executive order that prevents obsolete electronics from being shipped overseas before their critical materials are recovered. Every discarded device exported abroad is also an export of American resources, jobs, and economic resilience.

The technology already exists to recover these materials and return them to domestic supply chains. If the electronic waste generated annually in the United States were responsibly recycled, billions of pounds of critical materials could be recovered to strengthen American manufacturing and national security.

The materials are here. The opportunity is here. What America needs now is the resolve to keep these critical resources in American hands.

John Shegerian is Co-Founder, Chairman, and CEO of ER...

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