Are All The Critical Minerals We Need Sitting Under Our Noses?

Recycling the vast amounts of e-waste we discard every year could yield billions of dollars worth of critical rare earth minerals.

Discarded circuit boards

It may even be possible to extract these valuable resources in a reasonably eco-friendly way as a UK startup called DEScycle is now able to recover these important metals without energy-hungry smelting methods.

Using an intense solvent at room temperature, shredded circuit boards can have plastic retaining components left behind, while metals like gold, lithium, cobalt, and copper are selectively dissolved and made available for recovery with simple magnets.

It’s good news for recycling (the UN says that 75 percent of all electronic waste is not accounted for in recycling streams), and it's potentially good news for national security, as governments around the world attempt to secure long-term supplies of these metals for tech and defence sectors. Otherwise we have to rely on, predominantly, China to kindly release supplies.

As Scott Butler of nonprofit Material Focus in the UK told Reuters: “All the shenanigans of 2025 with calls on taking over [Greenland], disputes over land in Ukraine, big mines coming in Latin America, and geopolitical relations with China, this is all about the materials that’s inside this urban mine of tech. It’s lithium, it’s cobalt, it’s nickel, it’s gold, it’s aluminum, and steel. And this is why it’s really, really important. This isn’t just a pile of old tech, a pile of mess, this is the future.”

So, one of the richest sources of these minerals in the West could be the circuit boards embedded in the millions of broken and discarded devices that pile up higher and higher every year - and sitting right under our noses.