Recycling is pointless except when it’s not pointless.
Matt Bedingfield, whose company recycles technology, observes that during the war with Iran, American warships have been “running mine-clearance operations, intercepting Iranian-flagged cargo, and absorbing drone threats daily.” And, also, that those warships have been using guidance systems with permanent magnets that are “still refined in China” (Real Clear Defense, May 19, 2026)
The war once again proves, he says, that “we cannot fight a conflict while depending on an adversary for the materials inside our own weapons.”
Well, not quite, since we are in fact fighting a conflict while doing so. But it makes no sense to do so; for we know that, as we learned for sure last year, the People’s Republic of China will pull the plug on provision of such materials whenever it likes.
And there’s another source of urgency: “Beginning January 1, 2027, the Pentagon can no longer enter contracts for materials mined, refined, or separated in China, Russia, Iran, or North Korea.” The deadline is a matter of U.S. law going back to 2021.
Electronic waste to the rescue
Bedingfield argues that removing the dependency on China, which has to be done fast, can be largely accomplished by extracting critical-mineral components from defense electronics no longer being used. Yet only “about 15 percent of U.S. e-waste gets recycled.”
The Department of Energy just opened a $500 million funding opportunity for domestic critical minerals recycling. There’s talk of export restrictions on raw e-waste. But before we build a fence around these materials, we first need something inside it: the domestic capacity to process them onshore….
A new generation of hydrometallurgical processing, including biosorption, can recover high-purity metals from end-of-life electronics at commercial scale without the footprint of a smelter. These facilities can be built in about 15 months for roughly $40 million each. They maintain full chain of custody from waste stream to refined metal. And the upstream supply chain already exists: some 900 certified e-waste recyclers operate across the country today. What’s missing is the domestic processing capacity to keep those metals here.
This isn’t theoretical. My company, Mint Innovation, proved the model last month when HP announced the PC industry’s first certified closed-loop recycled copper. Copper recovered from HP’s own end-of-life circuit boards, independently certified, placed back into new HP products. The same technology can close the loop for the Department of War. Add mobile destruction units that process classified hardware on site, feeding directly into domestic metal recovery with no offshore processing, and the result is full auditability from destruction to refined metal.
Bedingfield, then, wants the federal government, which is “sitting on both the problem and the solution,” to arrange for the building the necessary facilities and, we may infer, enlist Mint Innovation to get all the recycling done. If it can, let it. We’re probably going to miss the deadline though if expansion of U.S. mining and imports of rare earths and critical minerals from acceptable foreign sources don’t fill the gap. January 1, 2027 is less than 15 months away.
Also see:
Rare Earth Exchanges: “The Pentagon’s Rare Earth Ultimatum: Ban on Chinese Materials by 2027” (September 5, 2025)
“Pentagon brass reinforced the urgency. Laura Taylor-Kale, Assistant Secretary of Defense for Industrial Base Policy, flatly warned in 2024: the U.S. ‘can no longer afford to rely on overseas, single points of failure for critical components.’ ”
