On July 30, 2026, President Trump signed a Presidential Determination under Section 101 of the Defense Production Act granting the Secretary of Commerce authority to institute export restrictions on recoverable critical minerals and materials [White House fact sheet, July 30, 2026]. The subject of the restriction is not ore. It is garbage. Black mass from used batteries, end-of-life permanent magnets, and other scrap containing minerals such as lithium, nickel and tungsten [Resource Recycling, July 31, 2026].

Read plainly, this is Washington conceding that the fastest-moving critical mineral supply it controls is the material already inside things Americans have thrown away. It is also a policy that fences in feedstock without building anywhere to put it.

What’s happening

• The determination lets Commerce issue “regulations, rules, guidance and procedures” keeping critical mineral supplies onshore. There is no word yet on when Commerce will act or what it will do [Resource Recycling, July 31, 2026].
• The White House logic is explicit: the US “holds substantial CMMs in finished goods like permanent magnets and lithium-ion batteries” while relying heavily on imports of certain of those same minerals [White House fact sheet, July 30, 2026].
• The material leaves because of capacity, not indifference. More black mass is generated in the US than domestic firms can process, and the country exports roughly 33,000 tonnes of e-scrap per month, a figure Resource Recycling attributes to the Basel Action Network.
• The processors meant to absorb it are failing. Li-Cycle and Ascend Elements have both filed for bankruptcy within roughly the past year, both citing the lack of a viable path to profitability [Resource Recycling, July 31, 2026].
• Industry welcomed the signal anyway. Cirba Solutions CEO David Klanecky said the move “reinforces that critical minerals and the need to keep end-of-life batteries and manufacturing scrap domestically are a long-term strategic priority for the US” [Resource Recycling, July 31, 2026].

The AI relevance is direct rather than metaphorical. Lithium and nickel recovered from black mass return to the battery storage hyperscale campuses install for ride-through. End-of-life NdFeB magnets are feedstock for the magnets in drives and cooling assemblies. Germanium, which Reuters notes is used in infrared sensors, is also the dopant that makes long-haul optical fiber work, and fiber is what stitches a distributed training cluster together.

Brazil angle

Brasília is legislating the same idea with more machinery attached. On May 6, 2026, Brazil’s House of Representatives approved a substitute text for Bill No. 2,780/2024, consolidating 14 related bills into a National Policy on Critical and Strategic Minerals. The bill defines urban mining as the collection, dismantling, separation, processing and refining of critical and strategic minerals from e-waste, batteries, end-of-life vehicles, construction debris and landfills, and attaches financing: CSLL tax credits capped at BRL 1 billion per year for 2030 to 2034 and limited to 20 percent of qualifying expenditure, a new class of incentivized debentures, and extension of the Reidi infrastructure tax regime to urban mining [Mattos Filho, May 14, 2026].

Two caveats matter. The bill was formally received by the Senate on May 8, 2026 and remains in tramitação awaiting despacho, so none of these instruments exists yet [Senado Federal, PL 2780/2024, matéria 174060]. And the same bill subjects offtake contracts and changes of corporate control over critical mineral rights to government ratification, deterring exactly the foreign capital urban mining needs. Brazil wrote the better policy on paper. It has not passed it, and it attached a discretionary approval gate to it.

US angle

The determination lands the same week Reuters surfaced a defense prime’s domestic sourcing talks. NioCorp Developments has signed a preliminary deal to supply Lockheed Martin with 15 tonnes per year of scandium from its Nebraska mine, slated to open by 2028 at 100 tonnes annual production. That volume is roughly a quarter of global scandium demand, which USGS estimates at about 60 tonnes and rising. The US has not mined scandium since 1969, and Rio Tinto is the only North American producer, at roughly nine tonnes a year [Reuters via Mining.com, August 4, 2026].

The recovered-materials thread runs through it. Lockheed is also in germanium talks with Quebec-based 5N Plus, which earlier this year received Pentagon funding to process the metal from recycled feedstock in Utah. USGS puts global germanium consumption at about 60 tonnes annually, and the US imports more than half of what it needs [Reuters via Mining.com, August 4, 2026]. Recycling is not a supplementary channel in that arithmetic. It is a primary one.

China angle

Beijing opened its door twelve months before Washington moved to close its own. China’s black mass import ban lifted on August 1, 2025, under an announcement issued by the Ministry of Ecology and Environment on June 10, 2025, reclassifying qualifying material as non-waste eligible for import, with separate standards for nickel-cobalt and lithium iron phosphate chemistries [Beveridge & Diamond via National Law Review, July 21, 2025].

The motive was idle capacity. By estimates cited in that analysis, China holds more than 85 percent of world black mass refining capacity, and 70 to 80 percent of it was idle at the time of writing. Because the US is not a party to the Basel Convention and EPA treats black mass as non-hazardous when it passes the toxicity leaching test, qualifying American material could move to China essentially without waste controls. Congress noticed: H.R. 10376 in the 118th Congress was written specifically to prohibit black mass exports to China. The framework it targeted is still standing. The DPA determination is the workaround.

Africa angle

The contrast with mine-side policy is the tell. In late July, Harena Rare Earths secured US$4.84 million from the US International Development Finance Corporation for its Ampasindava ionic clay project in Madagascar, a deposit containing 606,000 tonnes of rare earth oxides against a US$150 million development cost, targeting about 4,000 tonnes of oxide a year including roughly 1,700 tonnes of magnet rare earths. DFC signalled further support could follow, and Harena is evaluating processing options in the US and Europe [Mining.com.au, July 29, 2026]. Washington will spend under five million dollars to help open an African mine whose output still has nowhere domestic to go, while writing an export restriction on material already inside the country.

What it means

An export control is a demand-side instrument aimed at a supply-side problem. Restricting black mass exports lowers the domestic price of a material two of the largest US processors could not make money on even while selling into a global bid. That may be the point, since a captive discount is a transfer to whoever is still standing. But if Commerce writes the rule before processing capacity exists, the near-term result is stranded feedstock and a thinner market, not more refined metal.

For sovereignty accounting the structural picture does not move. Concentration in the SOV50 basket is derived from country-level production data, and a US scrap export rule changes none of it. What it changes is who gets first access to secondary units, and secondary units are the only ones that can arrive before 2028.

What to watch

• Commerce rulemaking scope. The determination sets no timetable. Watch whether Commerce writes a broad restriction at the HS-code level or a China-specific one, and whether it carves out OECD processors in Canada, Korea and Japan.
• November 9, 2026. The EU’s reclassification of black mass as hazardous waste becomes mandatory, barring EU exports to non-OECD destinations [National Law Review, July 21, 2025]. It falls one day before the suspension of China’s expanded rare earth export controls was, as of April reporting, set to expire on November 10, 2026 [Mining Technology, April 27, 2026]. If that lapse holds, two of the three largest jurisdictions retighten inside 48 hours.
• Brazil’s Senate calendar. PNMCE must clear the Senate and survive implementing regulation on the ratification gate before any urban mining credit is real. Watch whether the council language on offtake approval is narrowed.
• The Lockheed contracts. Reuters reports pricing and contract length have been sticking points with Teck and 5N Plus for more than a year. A signed germanium offtake priced off recycled Utah feedstock would test whether Western buyers will pay above the Chinese price for secondary supply.