The more I uncover, the more I’m amazed by how much I don’t know. And I’ve learned that I’m not alone.

I have spent my career working with technology, increasingly focused on reuse, recovery, lifecycle services and the industries surrounding them. More recently, my work as a DARPA Embedded Entrepreneur has taken me deeper into the challenge of recovering critical materials from technology and returning them to domestic supply chains.

That work led me to a difficult question:

How can we preserve more of technology’s value throughout its life, and when recovery is necessary, reintegrate those critical materials into domestic supply chains?

The question sounds like it belongs to the recycling industry. It doesn’t.

Recovering material is only one step. Before that material can return to production, it needs to be identified, separated, processed, refined, engineered and qualified for a particular application. Each stage depends on specialized knowledge, infrastructure, economics and customers. In many cases, the necessary capabilities no longer exist domestically or were never built at the required scale.

Answering the question meant looking beyond what happens at the end of a technology asset’s life. It meant understanding how technology is designed, manufactured, operated and maintained, as well as the materials, energy, water, infrastructure and industrial knowledge required to support it.

It also meant finding people who understood those subjects far better than I did. Their answers led to more questions and to others who could help connect the dots.

To understand what it would take to return critical materials to production, I first had to go back to where technology begins.

The Mine Is Not the Supply Chain

Never did I think I would become so fascinated with rocks, or more precisely, the minerals and elements inside them. But here we are. Everything we call technology starts with them.

I wanted to understand how material extracted from the earth becomes modern technology. What happens between the mine and the finished product? Who is involved? What does each stage require, and how does it affect water, energy, infrastructure, industry and communities?

I wanted to see the full three-dimensional picture, not a two-dimensional pencil sketch.

Dr. Wang Zhiqiang, who writes extensively about critical minerals, energy and industrial development, examines this hidden part of the supply chain in his recent article, The Mine Is Not the Supply Chain: Where the Competition for Critical Minerals Really Takes Place.

A mine does not produce a magnet, battery, semiconductor or finished technology. Between the material in the ground and the product in our hands sits a complex industrial system that is often glossed over as if it barely exists.

Dr. Wang illustrates this through the rare-earth supply chain. Once material is extracted, it must be crushed, milled and concentrated. It then undergoes chemical processing and technically demanding separation to produce individual rare-earth oxides. Those oxides must be converted into metals, alloys and magnetic powders before they can become high-performance magnets and other components.

It takes only a few sentences to describe that process. Actually making it happen is another matter entirely.

Each stage requires specialized facilities, equipment, processes and expertise. Each operates under different technical, environmental and economic conditions. And the output of one stage must meet the precise requirements of the next.

The chemistry matters. Purity matters. Consistency matters. Material form matters. Scale matters.

A missing capability or failure at any stage can impact everything that follows.

Yet public conversations often compress this entire system into a single objective: secure the mineral. Too often, it sounds like extracting a resource gives us the ability to manufacture the technology that needs it.

Dr. Wang’s article turns the lights on, revealing what is involved between the mine and the finished product. Once those stages become clear, so does the true scale of building or rebuilding an industrial supply chain.

If we want to control more of this supply chain, we need more than the resource itself. We need the facilities, equipment, knowledge and people required at every step. We need the energy, water and infrastructure to support them. And we need customers willing to qualify and buy what they produce.

Now consider that pathway in reverse, beginning when technology is decommissioned from service. The first priority should be preserving its productive value through maintenance, repair, reuse, redeployment and component recovery. But when material recovery becomes necessary, the answer is often reduced to one word: recycling.

What does recycling accomplish?

Recycling Is Not Reintegration

Recycling is a broad label covering a series of decisions and processes.

When a piece of technology is taken out of service, you can’t simply decide what to do with it and send it on its way. Data security, environmental requirements, regulations and chain-of-custody obligations all influence what happens next. Standards and certifications such as SERI’s R2 Standard, e-Stewards, the ADISA Asset Recovery Standard 8.0 and IEEE 2883 govern asset handling, data sanitization and downstream disposition. ISO standards add requirements around quality, environmental responsibility, information security and worker health and safety.

If the necessary governance is in place, then the physical work can begin. The asset may be inventoried, sanitized, dismantled or shredded. Components and materials are separated into different streams. Some move into established markets where their value is reduced to a price per pound. Others are downgraded, exported or stockpiled. For many critical materials, there is no established recovery market, so they are lost through shredding, mixed material streams, export or landfill.

For decades, the economics of electronics recycling have largely depended on materials with recognizable value and established recovery markets, particularly precious metals such as gold and silver, and base metals such as copper.

Many critical materials don’t fit that model. They typically exist in extremely small concentrations, are embedded within complex components or might be bonded with other substances. Recovering them can require specialized disassembly, chemistry and processing that were never part of the traditional recycling system.

And the technology itself brings another set of complications. Its composition, origin, manufacturing process, use and condition can affect whether its materials can be safely separated, traced and recovered. Contamination or hazardous substances can change the process entirely.

Even successful recovery doesn’t close the loop.

A recovered powder, concentrate, alloy or mixed material is not automatically suitable for manufacturing. It must be characterized, refined and engineered into a consistent form, often with traceability to its elemental composition and origin. It must then be tested and qualified against the specifications of the manufacturer expected to use it.

Reintegration also requires sufficient volume, workable economics and a buyer prepared to accept the result.

The Global E-waste Monitor 2024 found that only 22.3 percent of the e-waste generated globally in 2022 was formally collected and recycled. Viewed through the lens of reintegration, even that figure overstates how much circularity was achieved. It tells us only that material entered a formal recycling process. It does not tell us how much of its value was successfully put back to work.

So the question we face is whether we can build what is needed to return recovered material to production at an economically viable scale.

What It Takes to Build a Supply Chain

The emerging rare-earth supply chain around MP Materials gives us a glimpse of what rebuilding domestic capability requires.

Mountain Pass was once the world’s leading source of rare earths. After years of operational, environmental and economic difficulty, production was idled in 2015. MP Materials acquired the site in 2017 and restarted mining, but getting the mine running was only the beginning.

The ore could be mined and concentrated in the United States, but many of the capabilities needed after that were still elsewhere. Concentrate from Mountain Pass had to be sent to China for separation and refining before the individual elements could be used in manufacturing.

That middle of the supply chain is easy to leave out of the story. It is also where much of the difficulty lies.

MP Materials began rebuilding those missing steps. It started producing separated rare-earth products at Mountain Pass in 2023. In January 2025, its Independence facility in Fort Worth began commercial production of neodymium-praseodymium metal and trial production of finished magnets. Commercial magnet manufacturing followed later that year.

Getting there required years of technical development, workforce preparation and substantial public and private investment. A multibillion-dollar partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense provided funding and long-term commitments to accelerate domestic magnet production.

And even that is only part of what is needed. Building facilities and developing the technology do not create a functioning market. Someone must be willing to qualify and buy what comes out the other end.

In July 2025, Apple announced a $500 million commitment to purchase American-made rare-earth magnets from MP Materials, expand magnet manufacturing in Texas and establish a dedicated recycling line at Mountain Pass. The new line is intended to process magnet scrap and material recovered from used electronics so it can be reprocessed for use in Apple products.

Consider everything that had to come together. The mine had to operate. Separation and refining had to be brought back. Metals and magnets had to be produced. Workers had to be trained. Government and private capital had to share the risk. Apple had to qualify the product and commit to buying it. A recycling line then had to be developed so recovered material could find its way back into production.

But Apple is one company working with one supplier around particular materials and products. How do we make this work across companies, industries and technologies? Someone must help align specifications, available material, processing capabilities, investment, demand and risk.

Battery recycling shows the same problem from the other direction.

A battery can be collected, discharged and processed into black mass containing lithium, nickel, cobalt, manganese and graphite. But black mass is not a new battery. Those materials still must be separated, refined and converted into forms that meet battery-grade specifications before manufacturers can use them again.

The United States has invested heavily in collecting and processing batteries, but domestic capacity for the next stages has not developed at the same pace.

A Commerce Department temporary final rule, issued as a DPAS Directive Allocation Order, brought that gap into sharp focus. Beginning August 27, 2026, U.S. sellers of black mass were required to allocate 100 percent of their monthly sales to U.S. buyers unless they received an adjustment or exception from the Bureau of Industry and Security.

The objective is understandable. Materials recovered in the United States should support domestic supply chains. But requiring material to remain here does not create the ability to process it.

American Battery Technology Company subsequently received authorization from the Bureau of Industry and Security to export and sell up to $100 million of recycled black mass under specified terms. The company can recover the material domestically, but the authorization exposes what is still missing: enough domestic refining capacity and commercial demand to absorb what is being recovered.

The lesson is the same in both directions. Policy can change where material goes. Technology can solve an individual step. Capital can build a facility. But unless the specifications, capabilities, supply, demand and economics line up, the material stalls somewhere in the middle.

A Broader View of Technology Stewardship

Seeing everything involved changed how I viewed technology stewardship. I realized the way we approached technology across its lifecycle was too narrow.

Technology stewardship could not begin when an asset was taken out of service. By then, most of the decisions affecting what would happen to it had already been made.

Those decisions begin with design. What materials went into the product? How was it built? Can it be maintained, repaired or upgraded? How much energy, water and infrastructure does it need to operate? Can it be reused somewhere else? Can we recover its components? And when we need to recover the materials, can anyone process them so they can go back into production?

Choices made early determine which options we have later.

Technology stewardship has to begin before something is manufactured and continue throughout its life and beyond. We need to preserve as much value as possible for as long as possible, then make sure the asset, its components and its materials have somewhere useful to go next.

The decisions across that lifecycle are connected, just like the people making them.

And those decisions increasingly extend beyond the walls of any one company or facility.

A company can make a perfectly rational decision for itself while creating a problem somewhere else. New technology may work exactly as designed, but its deployment may depend on energy, water or infrastructure that is not available at the scale required. We see products designed in one country, manufactured across several more, used somewhere else and eventually recovered in a market that has no way to process what they contain.

These issues used to be discussed mostly under sustainability. Today, they are also about supply-chain resilience, business continuity and, in some cases, national security.

Addressing them requires something new. It requires bringing together people who would not typically sit at the same table.

Why This Requires an Alliance

I did not set out to create another alliance. But the more I understood what was required, and how geopolitics were reshaping our supply chains, the need became difficult to ignore.

MP Materials needed a mine, processing, manufacturing, government support, private investment, workers and a committed customer. Black mass has recoverable material, but not enough domestic refining capacity or demand to absorb it.

In both cases, every individual participant can do its part and the overall system can still fall short. Now consider how many versions of this problem exist across different materials and technologies.

If we are serious about rebuilding domestic capability, we need better ways of working together.

I keep coming back to America’s industrial mobilization during World War II. Automakers and manufacturers retooled their operations to produce aircraft, vehicles and equipment at a scale few would have thought possible. Ford began producing B-24 bombers. General Motors redirected its factories and workforce across an enormous range of military production.

None of them accomplished that transformation alone. It required government, industry, capital, infrastructure and labor to align around a shared national objective with extraordinary urgency and commitment. The circumstances today are different, but the lesson still applies.

Much of the expertise we need already exists, but it is spread across companies, universities, research institutions, government agencies, trade organizations, standards bodies and communities. After decades of globalization, gaps in our knowledge have emerged, capabilities have become disconnected and no one entity is responsible for bringing everything together.

The Alliance does not replace existing trade groups or organizations already doing important work. It creates a place for them to work across the boundaries that usually keep them apart.

For material reintegration, that could mean bringing technology owners, recovery companies, processors, manufacturers, academia, researchers, innovators, policymakers and others together to determine what should be recovered, in what form, at what volume and under what conditions it can return to production. The same approach can be applied wherever a promising solution depends on decisions, capabilities and resources controlled by different participants.

The purpose is to identify what is missing, determine what is possible and bring together the people and resources needed to deliver solutions.

The Work Ahead

The Technology Stewardship Alliance's work begins with making better use of the technology we already have, extending its productive life through maintenance, repair, reuse, support, and other strategies that preserve its value for as long as practical.

But technology eventually reaches the end of its useful life. And what happens next presents one of our greatest challenges and opportunities.

Critical-material reintegration will be a major focus of the Alliance's work. Recovering these materials is only the beginning. Returning them to productive use requires connecting recovery capabilities, processing technologies, manufacturer specifications, industrial capacity, and market demand. In many cases, the technologies, infrastructure, and commercial pathways needed to make this possible have yet to be developed or scaled.

We know enough to begin. We also know that new questions, dependencies, and opportunities will emerge as the work advances.

If your work touches any part of these ecosystems, you may see or know something others do not. We welcome your perspective.

Selected Sources