In Part 1 of this series, we laid out the stakes: critical minerals and rare earth elements are foundational to modern manufacturing, and the United States is heavily dependent on foreign sources for most of them. Some — including gallium and indium — are currently 100% import-dependent, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.
That’s a vulnerability. But it’s one the industry is actively working to close. And one of the most promising approaches doesn’t involve opening a single new mine.
The Supply Gap Isn’t Just a Mining Problem
The conventional response to a materials shortage is to find new deposits and dig. But new mines take a decade or more to permit and develop — and the geopolitical conditions that created today’s supply vulnerabilities don’t pause during that process.
There’s another path: recovering the critical minerals and rare earth elements embedded in the technology we’ve already built. End-of-life electronics, retired batteries, and decommissioned solar panels contain meaningful concentrations of copper, gold, silver, cobalt, lithium, and rare earth oxides. In many cases, recovery from these sources is more economical than primary mining — and far faster to scale.
The question is whether the infrastructure exists to collect, process, and refine that material at the volumes that matter. That’s where responsible ITAD companies — and their upstream partners — play a direct role in U.S. supply chain security.
From IT Closet to Critical Mineral Supply Chain
When an organization retires a server, a fleet of laptops, or a data center full of equipment, what happens next has real consequences — not just for data security and environmental compliance, but for material recovery.
PedalPoint, as a certified ITAD provider and U.S. subsidiary of Korea Zinc — the world’s largest nonferrous metal smelter — is positioned at the front end of a supply chain that runs all the way from corporate IT retirement to refined metal output. The materials recovered through responsible e-waste processing feed directly into Korea Zinc’s refining operations, which have produced copper exclusively from recycled feedstock for decades.
This isn’t a theoretical pipeline. Korea Zinc’s Onsan Smelter — the largest single-site nonferrous smelter in the world — already processes complex, mixed-material waste streams to recover copper, gold, silver, palladium, and other metals at scale. The ITAD and e-waste collection network PedalPoint operates in the United States is built to supply that refining capacity with domestically sourced, fully traceable material.
Rare Earth Recovery: The Next Frontier
Critical minerals like copper and cobalt are well-established targets for secondary recovery. Rare earth elements are harder — they exist in smaller concentrations, in more complex material streams, and require specialized processing technology that hasn’t historically been available at commercial scale in the United States.
That’s beginning to change. In early 2026, Korea Zinc announced a partnership with Alta Resource Technologies to establish a rare earth processing joint venture in the United States. The facility — to be located at a PedalPoint site — will recover high-purity rare earth oxides from waste permanent magnets: the components found in EV motors, wind turbines, hard drives, and consumer electronics.
The initial production target is approximately 100 tons of waste magnets processed annually, yielding oxides of neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium — rare earths that are essential to the high-performance magnets used across defense, clean energy, and advanced manufacturing. Commercial operations are targeted for 2027, with capacity expanding from there.
Alta’s approach uses proprietary protein-based chemistry to selectively extract rare earths from complex waste streams — a process that makes recovery economically viable at concentrations where conventional methods fall short. The feedstock for this effort will come from America. The processing will be American. And the output will remain in allied supply chains.
Building Domestic Refining Capacity at Scale
Recovery and refining are distinct challenges. Even if rare earths and critical minerals are collected domestically, they need somewhere to be processed — and the United States has seen decades of smelting and refining capacity close or go offshore.
Korea Zinc is working to address that directly. In December 2025, the company announced a partnership with the U.S. Department of Commerce and the U.S. Department of War to build an integrated critical minerals smelter in Clarksville, Tennessee.
The Tennessee facility will be modeled on Korea Zinc’s Onsan Smelter and will process approximately 1.1 million tons of raw material annually, producing 540,000 tons of finished product across 13 critical and strategic minerals. That includes strategic materials like antimony, gallium, germanium, indium, and bismuth, alongside base metals and precious metals. Phased commercial operations are targeted for 2029.
The smelter will be built on the site of the existing Nyrstar facility in Clarksville — currently the only primary zinc smelter in the United States — preserving skilled workforce capacity that would otherwise be lost as aging domestic infrastructure winds down.
Why This Matters for Your Organization
Supply chain resilience isn’t just a federal policy concern. It affects the manufacturers, technology companies, and institutions that depend on these materials to build and operate the products their businesses run on.
Responsible IT asset disposition is one of the few points where any organization — regardless of size or industry — directly participates in the critical minerals supply chain. When retired technology is processed through certified ITAD providers with genuine downstream refining connections, the materials inside it have a path back into domestic production.
PedalPoint provides certified IT asset disposition services with full chain-of-custody documentation, ensuring your retired technology is handled responsibly and its materials are recovered for domestic supply chains.