Recycling Potential: Can Secondary Supply Reduce Criticality?

Recycling potential measures the degree to which end-of-life recovery and secondary production can supplement or replace primary extraction for a given mineral. In criticality frameworks, high recycling potential acts as a mitigating factor: if a significant share of a mineral's demand can be met through recycling, its effective supply risk is reduced. Conversely, minerals with low recycling rates face heightened long-term criticality because every unit consumed represents an irreversible draw on primary resources.

The importance of recycling potential has grown as criticality assessments have evolved to consider long-term supply sustainability alongside near-term disruption risk. With demand for critical minerals projected to grow several-fold over the coming decades, recycling represents one of the few supply-side strategies that can scale without the 10-15 year lead times required for new mining projects. However, the current reality for most critical minerals is sobering: recycling rates remain extremely low, and significant technical, economic, and logistical barriers must be overcome before secondary supply can meaningfully reduce criticality.

Current Recycling Rates

The recycling performance of critical minerals varies enormously. Metals with established, high-value recycling streams show relatively good end-of-life recovery rates. Many critical minerals, however, are recycled at rates below 1%:

• Platinum group metals: PGMs have the highest recycling rates among critical minerals, exceeding 50% for automotive catalytic converters and approaching 90% for industrial platinum. The high value per unit weight makes collection and recovery economically attractive.
• Cobalt: End-of-life recycling rates for cobalt are approximately 30-35%, primarily from superalloy scrap and battery recycling. However, with the massive growth in battery applications, the volume of cobalt reaching end-of-life from batteries remains limited due to the long service life of EVs (10-15 years).
• Lithium: Lithium recycling rates are below 5% globally. While lithium is technically recoverable from spent batteries, the economics have historically been unfavorable compared to primary production. This is changing as lithium prices have risen and regulations like the EU Battery Regulation mandate minimum recycled content.
• Rare earth elements: Less than 1% of rare earths are recycled globally. The complex metallurgy involved in separating individual rare earth elements from magnets, combined with the dispersed nature of many applications and the relatively low value-to-weight ratio of mixed rare earth scrap, makes economic recycling extremely challenging.
• Gallium, germanium, and indium: These specialty metals have near-zero end-of-life recycling rates. They are used in tiny quantities in complex products (semiconductors, fiber optics, thin-film coatings), making collection and separation impractical at scale with current technology. New scrap recycling from manufacturing processes is more common but does not reduce primary demand.
• Graphite: End-of-life recycling of battery-grade graphite is still in early stages. While graphite anode material can be recovered from spent batteries, the recovered material often requires significant reprocessing to meet battery specifications.

Barriers to Recycling

Several systemic barriers explain why critical mineral recycling rates remain low:

• Product design: Many products are not designed for disassembly. Critical minerals are often used in small quantities, dispersed across complex assemblies, and bonded or alloyed in ways that make separation difficult. A smartphone may contain over 30 different elements, each in milligram quantities, making individual element recovery uneconomical.
• Collection infrastructure: End-of-life products must be collected before they can be recycled. For consumer electronics, collection rates are often below 20% in many regions, with discarded products ending up in landfills or informal waste streams.
• Separation technology: Extracting individual critical minerals from complex waste streams requires specialized hydrometallurgical and pyrometallurgical processes. For rare earths, separating individual elements (which have very similar chemical properties) is particularly energy-intensive and technically demanding.
• Economic viability: Recycling must compete with primary production on cost. When primary mineral prices are low, recycling operations become uneconomical. This price sensitivity has historically made investment in recycling infrastructure risky.
• Time lag: Even if perfect recycling were achieved, the lag between when minerals enter the economy (in new products) and when they become available for recycling (at end of life) means that recycling cannot meet demand growth in the near term. An EV battery manufactured today will not reach end-of-life for 10-15 years.

How Recycling Potential Is Assessed

Criticality frameworks measure recycling potential through several indicators:

• End-of-life recycling rate (EOL-RR): The percentage of a mineral contained in end-of-life products that is actually recovered and returned to productive use. This is the most commonly used metric.
• Recycled content rate: The share of a mineral's total consumption that is sourced from recycled material, combining both old scrap (end-of-life) and new scrap (manufacturing waste).
• Technical recyclability: An assessment of whether the technology exists to recover the mineral, regardless of current economic viability.
• Urban mine potential: The total quantity of a mineral embedded in products currently in use or in landfills, representing a theoretical secondary resource.

In the EU's framework, recycling potential directly reduces the supply risk score: a higher EOL-RR lowers the effective supply risk of a mineral. In the U.S. framework, recycling potential is considered as a mitigating factor but is weighed less heavily than diversification of primary supply.

The Path Forward

Improving recycling potential requires coordinated action across the value chain. Design-for-recycling principles can make future products easier to disassemble and recover. Extended producer responsibility (EPR) regulations can improve collection rates. Investment in advanced recycling technologies, including direct recycling of battery cathodes and hydrometallurgical recovery of rare earths, can improve economics. Mandatory recycled content requirements, such as those in the EU Battery Regulation, create guaranteed demand for secondary materials and incentivize investment.

For a broader discussion of how recycling fits into the circular economy for critical minerals, see Recycling and Circularity.