As the New York Times reported: “The Chinese government ordered restrictions on the export of six heavy rare earth metals, which are refined entirely in China, as well as rare earth magnets, 90 percent of which are produced in China. The metals, and special magnets made with them, can now be shipped out of China only with special export licenses.”
In the long run, the United States should reopen its own rare earth mining, currently limited to a single site in the Mojave Desert, notwithstanding significant private development interest in other California and Texas sites. In the meantime, there’s another approach the U.S. should adopt: mining our trash for those very same elements, now headed for landfills.
The fact is that all the stuff we are putting into those blue curbside bins amounts to little more than virtue signaling that is costly to municipalities and overlooks “trash” that has real value. On every trash day, people dutifully separate paper, cans, and plastic and sort them into recycling bins. Many of these items have little or no commercial value; just picking them up can be a money-losing proposition for local governments.
As Alexander Clapp has made powerfully clear in his new book, Waste Wars: The Wild Afterlife of Your Trash, much of what is supposedly sent to be recycled winds up in Third World landfills, trash fires, or, in the case of microplastics, in the marine food chain. Much of what we think is recycling can better be characterized as “wish-cycling.” As Clapp puts it, “The waste that travels across the globe and often inflicts irreversible environmental damage is not the trash that—to much chagrin—goes into the garbage bin and then into the local landfill. It’s the stuff that you place in the recycling bin in the conviction that doing so is helping the planet.”
But the same garbage trucks that carry away household trash to landfills also cart off discarded computers, iPhones, televisions, and more, all containing those same rare earths that China mines and now restricts.
For those who are not regular subscribers to Waste Management magazine, a study in its February 2020 issue tells this sad story:
“Fifty-six elements were quantified or detected in these devices: 14 rare earth elements, six platinum group metals, 20 critical metals, and 16 other elements, including some precious metals. A single device could include a wide range of elements: 48 metals were quantified in the computer hard drives. The estimated economic value of the metals in each device ranged from $12.94 USD (computer wiring) to $454 USD (hard drives). The variety of metals in electronic devices suggests that end-of-life management strategies should focus on recycling and recovery, which also decreases the overall environmental impacts of the devices, especially associated with mining and refining metals.”
At the same time we sort out plastic water bottles, we are simply tossing out a literal gold mine. Recycling e-waste should not require subsidies at all. Localities simply would have to collect it separately and contract with those who would reuse it. This is not an eco-fantasy. As one industry source puts it: “The global e-waste market was estimated at $49 million in 2020 and is expected to grow to $143 million by 2028. Ever increasing demand and scarcity of rare metals has been leading to a rapid rise in prices for these metals.”
AMAZON WAGES QUIET WAR TO STOP STATES FROM TAKING CHINESE EQUIPMENT OUT OF GOVERNMENT OFFICES
The Department of Energy has even endorsed the possibility that a new generation of incinerators could capture such metals by processing their ash. What’s more, absent intervention to prevent e-waste from going to landfills, it can contaminate lakes, rivers, and groundwater. And, if rare earths don’t come from China, they may come from conflict zones such as the Democratic Republic of Congo.
During World War II, Washington organized nationwide scrap metal drives, called “metals for victory.” Households put aside scrap for the war effort. If we are to be in a trade war with China, simply separating our electronic trash can be a contemporary version. Even absent a tariff-induced conflict, it’s simply a good idea.
Howard Husock is a senior fellow in Domestic Policy Studies at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on municipal government, urban housing policy, civil society, and philanthropy.
This article was originally published at www.washingtonexaminer.com
