Repair Is Climate Action: The Hidden Link to Rare Earth Supply Chains

Last Monday, April 20, I sat in a packed room at PYXERA Global in Washington, DC for a Climate Week session called "Critical Minerals and the Future of Secure Supply Chains." The audience was a mix of corporate sustainability leaders, policy advisors, and circular economy experts from Anthesis Group, the Circular Supply Chain Coalition, and Pyxera Global. On the panel was Rob Lawson-Shanks, CEO of MOLG, a company building robots that disassemble electronics to recover the critical materials inside. The conversation moved fast across two big questions: where the metals in our phones, laptops, tablets, game consoles, smart home devices, and EVs actually come from, and what it is going to take to keep that supply chain from becoming a national vulnerability.

That session was one of hundreds of events held during DC Climate Week 2026, a community-driven initiative running April 20 through 26 in the nation's capital. DCCW is the work of an all-volunteer team led by co-founders C'pher Gresham, an entrepreneur and co-founder of grid-technology company Gridvolve, and Vid Mićević, an investor at Collaborative Fund, alongside key organizer Dr. Justin Brodie-Kommit. The week was designed to connect policymakers, investors, and technologists around real climate solutions, and the rare earth and critical minerals track was one of its most consequential threads.

What struck me most was the room itself. Half the audience came in worried about extractive mining and carbon emissions. The other half came in worried about supply chain resilience and national security. Different starting points. Same conclusion.

Repair the device in your pocket. Repair the laptop on your desk. Repair the tablet your kid uses, the console in your living room, the smart thermostat on your wall, the wireless earbuds in your bag. Keep them in service. Doing so is one of the most direct climate actions a regular person can take, and it is one of the quietest ways every consumer reinforces American supply chain resilience at the same time.

Repair is climate action. Repair is also supply chain security. Both are true at once, and that is exactly why this issue is one of the rare places where the green crowd and the resilience crowd land in the same place.

Here is the full story.

What's Actually Inside Your Devices

The smartphone in your pocket. The laptop on your desk. The tablet on your nightstand. The console under your TV. The smart speaker on your shelf. The thermostat on your wall. Every one of them contains dozens of critical minerals and rare earth elements. Most consumers have no idea how many.

Here is the short tour.

Neodymium is the powerhouse. It makes the world's strongest permanent magnets, which is why it shows up in your phone's vibration motor, your speakers, your headphones, and the read-write arms of every hard drive ever made. Dysprosium gets added to neodymium magnets to keep them magnetic at high temperatures, which matters for laptop cooling fans, gaming console fans, and electric vehicle motors. Cerium is the polishing agent that makes your screen glass and camera lens smooth and clear. Lanthanum sits inside roughly half of all digital camera lenses, including the one on your phone, refracting light and reducing distortion. Europium and terbium are phosphors. They are the reason your display can produce vivid red and green. Yttrium does similar work in LED lighting and lasers.

Then there is copper. Copper is not a rare earth, but in 2023 the U.S. Department of Energy added it to the official Critical Materials List for the first time, joining the European Union, Japan, India, Canada, and China in formally recognizing copper as a strategic resource. Copper is the workhorse metal that physically moves electricity through every device. The "roads" carry every signal between every chip. Inside modern semiconductors, microscopic copper interconnects link billions of transistors. Copper heat sinks keep your laptop from frying itself.

The other critical metals matter too.

• Lithium, cobalt, and nickel power the battery in every portable gadget, from smartphones to laptops to wireless earbuds to electric toothbrushes.
• Tantalum lives inside the tiny capacitors that store energy on the logic board, and the United States imports almost all of it.
• Gallium and germanium are essential for semiconductors, 5G, and fiber-optic technology.
• Silver and gold plate the connectors that keep your charging port working for years.

Multiply that material list across every smartphone, laptop, tablet, smart TV, game console, smart speaker, connected appliance, fitness tracker, and IoT device in every American home. The numbers get staggering fast. Every single one of these metals has to be pulled out of the ground. Every single one is finite. And the supply chain that delivers them to American consumers has a problem.

The China Problem

Here is the part the carrier salesperson is not going to mention when you walk in for an upgrade.

China dominates the global rare earth supply chain at every stage. According to the International Energy Agency, China accounted for around 60% of global rare earth mining output in 2024. The bigger number is what happens after mining. China handles roughly 91% of the world's rare earth separation and refining. And in the manufacturing of the rare earth permanent magnets that go into phones, laptops, EVs, wind turbines, industrial motors, data centers, and defense systems, China's share has climbed to 94%.

Translate that into plain English. Almost every smartphone, every laptop, every tablet, every gaming console, every smart device, every EV motor, every wind turbine, and every guided missile contains materials that passed through Chinese facilities at some point in their journey.

China has, on multiple occasions over the past fifteen years, used that leverage. Export quotas. Pricing pressure. Targeted restrictions. As recently as October 2025, China expanded export controls on rare earths and on the equipment used to process them. The Critical Minerals panel I sat in on last week was, at its core, a room full of corporate and policy leaders trying to figure out how to operate in an environment where the front of the supply chain can be turned off by a single foreign government.

This is not a partisan issue. It is a structural one. American manufacturing, American defense systems, and American consumers all sit downstream of decisions made in Beijing about how much rare earth material to release to global markets and at what price.

The strategic responses on the table fall into three buckets:

1. Open new mines outside China.
2. Build new processing capacity outside China.
3. Recover what we already have in circulation rather than digging up more.

The first two take a decade and billions of dollars. The third one is available right now. Every device kept in service is a device that does not require fresh ore from anywhere, and a device whose materials are still recoverable when the day finally comes.

Repair is the cheapest, fastest, most decentralized supply chain resilience strategy this country has. Every independent repair shop in the WhereToRepair directory is, in a real sense, a small node in American material security.

The Climate Math Is Stark

For the sustainability crowd, the case is just as straightforward. The longer a device stays in use, the less new mining is needed to feed the manufacturing pipeline. That is not opinion. That is lifecycle math, and the numbers come from peer-reviewed lifecycle assessments.

• Smartphones: A study by Germany's Fraunhofer Institute for Reliability and Microintegration IZM found that keeping a smartphone in service for seven years, including two battery replacements, can reduce its annual carbon footprint by 44% compared to a three-year replacement cycle.
• Personal computers: Extending the useful life of a PC from four years to six years cuts more than 25 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent emissions every year.
• Repair vs. replacement broadly: A third-party study funded by Microsoft, conducted in response to a shareholder resolution from the nonprofit As You Sow and reported by Earth911, found that repairing a product instead of replacing it can lead to a 92% reduction in both e-waste and greenhouse gas emissions.
• Across product categories: A lifecycle analysis found that repairing and reusing products reduces climate-related impacts by up to 40%, with the biggest gains showing up when devices stay in service beyond ten years.

These are not marginal numbers. They are the difference between a planet on track for serious decarbonization and one that just keeps digging.

The E-Waste Side of the Same Coin

In 2022, the most recent year for which the United Nations has published comprehensive data, the world generated a record 62 million metric tons of electronic waste. That figure is projected to climb to 82 million metric tons by 2030, according to the UN's Global E-waste Monitor. Most of it gets buried, burned, or shipped overseas to be picked apart by hand. Less than a quarter of the global total, 22.3% in 2022, was documented as formally collected and recycled in an environmentally sound way.

Every device that ends up in a landfill takes its rare earths and critical minerals with it. The neodymium, dysprosium, cobalt, and tantalum that took enormous environmental and geopolitical cost to extract simply leach into the soil or get incinerated. Then we mine more, often from countries that can choose to slow the spigot at any moment.

Here is the punchline that should infuriate every consumer regardless of political stripe.

Meanwhile, a study of 599 electronic devices brought to a single recycling center found that 46% of them were immediately reusable or repairable. Almost half of what people assumed was trash still had useful life in it.

This is what I have called perceived obsolescence. It is the gap between when someone decides a device is finished and when the device actually is finished. That gap is where the climate damage hides. It is where the rare earth waste hides. And it is where America's supply chain vulnerability hides too, because every prematurely retired device sends a fresh demand signal back up the chain to a mine, refinery, and magnet factory that are probably not on American soil.

The "Out of Sight, Out of Mind" Era of E-Waste

For decades, the standard answer to the rare earth recovery problem was simple and ugly: ship our electronic waste to developing countries and let someone else deal with it. Old computers and phones got loaded into containers and sent to processing operations in Ghana, Nigeria, China, India, Pakistan, and the Philippines, where workers, often including children, picked through the piles by hand, burned plastic casings to expose the metal underneath, and dunked circuit boards in open acid baths to recover small amounts of gold and copper.

Out of sight. Out of mind. Out of the reach of any environmental regulation worth the name.

If you have not seen it, the 2024 Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, directed by Nic Stacey and released on November 20, 2024, is worth two hours of your time. It walks through the full ugly arc of overconsumption, planned obsolescence, greenwashing, and where our discarded products actually end up. It is the kind of film that changes how you look at the next "deal" your carrier offers on a phone upgrade.

The new generation of recovery technologies, which I will get to in a moment, makes the old export-and-forget model both unnecessary and indefensible. We can do this work here, cleaner, with better outcomes for workers and the environment.

Why People Replace Too Early

Most premature device retirements come down to the same short list of issues, and almost every one of them has a solution that does not require buying new.

• Battery degradation. Usually the first component to go, and almost always replaceable by an independent repair shop for a fraction of the cost of a new device. This is true for smartphones, laptops, tablets, smartwatches, and most modern wireless earbuds.
• Cracked screens and broken ports. Often cheaper to repair than to trade in, especially once you factor in what carriers do not tell you about trade-in values. We covered the trade-in trap in our Repair or Replace article.
• Software obsolescence. Manufacturers stop pushing updates to older hardware long before the device itself has worn out. That is a deliberate design choice, not a hardware limitation.
• Planned obsolescence. Some products are engineered with short lifespans or constructed in ways that make repair difficult or impossible. By design, not by accident.

A repairable device is a longer-lasting device. A longer-lasting device is a device that does not pull more cobalt out of the Congo or more dysprosium out of Inner Mongolia.

Everything Can Be Repaired

This is the part of the conversation Big Tech really does not want consumers to internalize.

Everything can be repaired. It is only ever a question of cost and effort. A motherboard with a single failed component can be repaired at the chip level by a skilled technician. A phone screen the carrier store called "totaled" can be replaced for a fraction of a new device. A laptop the manufacturer has declared unrepairable because the part number is no longer in their system can usually be brought back to life by an independent shop with the right donor parts and the right skills.

The real question is never "can this be fixed." The real question is "is the cost of fixing it less than the value of keeping it." That is a calculation worth making honestly, and it is a calculation you should never trust to the entity trying to sell you a brand new product.

The right person to ask is an independent repair professional. They have no incentive to push you toward a new device. Their job is to give you a straight answer about whether the repair makes financial sense, and to do the work cleanly and affordably if it does. You can find an independent repair shop near you through the WhereToRepair directory.

Urban Mining: The New Frontier

There is one more piece of the supply chain story that almost no consumer has heard about, and it deserves attention because it changes the long-term picture for both the environmental and the security crowds.

It is called urban mining. The idea is straightforward. Instead of digging fresh ore out of the earth, recover the rare earths and critical materials that already exist in the giant pile of electronics circulating through, and stored in, American homes and businesses. E-waste is the fastest-growing solid waste stream on the planet. It is also one of the richest concentrations of neodymium, dysprosium, cobalt, copper, gold, and silver anywhere outside an active mine. Some bioleaching processes can recover up to 90% of the targeted materials with significantly lower energy consumption than traditional mining.

The science is moving fast, and importantly, it is getting cleaner. The traditional approach to recovering rare earths from electronics involved aggressive acids and high heat, which created their own environmental headache and made the process unattractive to host in any developed country. The new generation of techniques is built on a different premise.

• Bioleaching uses bacteria such as Gluconobacter, or specialized fungi, to produce organic acids that gently leach rare earths out of e-waste. Biodegradable. Lower energy. No toxic acid bath.
• Acid-free copper salt leaching uses copper salts to dissolve and separate rare earth elements from magnets, eliminating the need for volatile, toxic acids.
• Ionic liquids and what researchers call "peculiar fluids" use specialized liquid salts that allow separation and purification without the high-energy molten salts traditional processes required.
• Ligand-based extraction uses engineered proteins or microbes that bind specifically to rare earth elements, pulling them out of e-waste with high purity and selectivity.
• Robotic disassembly is happening on the front end, where machines selectively harvest valuable components before any chemical processing begins. That is exactly what MOLG is building, and exactly what Rob Lawson-Shanks described from the panel last week. Machines that take electronics apart with surgical precision so the materials inside can re-enter the supply chain at maximum value.

The Cheese Story (Yes, Really)

My favorite urban mining breakthrough has nothing to do with robots, acids, or AI. It has to do with cheese.

Researchers at ETH Zurich in Switzerland, led by Professor Raffaele Mezzenga, have developed a method for recovering gold from electronic waste using whey, the leftover liquid from the cheesemaking process. The team denatures the whey proteins, turning them into amyloid nanofibrils, then freeze-dries the result into a lightweight protein sponge known as an aerogel. When dropped into a solution of dissolved circuit boards, the sponge selectively grabs gold ions out of the mixture and ignores nearly everything else.

In one experiment, the team recovered a 450-milligram, 22-carat gold nugget from just 20 discarded computer motherboards. Mezzenga's calculations show that the procurement and energy costs of the entire process come out roughly 50 times lower than the value of the gold recovered. The same team is now expanding the method to recover rare earth elements.

Logical next move, in my professional opinion: take the spent whey, turn it back into cheese, and market it as Gold Cheese. $40 a wheel. Certified to contain microscopic traces of recovered Apple motherboard. I am available to consult on the branding. Royalties accepted in cash, gold, or cheese.

Joke aside, the deeper point matters. Urban mining is not science fiction. It is happening right now, in working laboratories, with technologies cheap enough and clean enough to scale. It will not solve America's critical minerals problem on its own. But combined with longer device lifespans, it represents a real, emerging, domestic supply chain that does not depend on any single foreign government deciding to be cooperative, and that does not require continuing to ship our problem to developing countries.

For now, the fastest contribution any consumer can make to that future is simple. Keep devices in service. When they finally stop working, get them into the recovery stream instead of the drawer or the landfill.

Keeping Tech Working Longer

You do not need a degree in materials science to extend the useful life of your devices. A handful of habits go a long way, and they apply across phones, laptops, tablets, consoles, and connected devices alike.

• Take care of the battery. Do not leave devices in a hot or freezing car. Do not let the battery drain to zero on a regular basis. Use the optimized charging modes built into modern phones and laptops.
• Keep it physically clean. Dust in fans and air intakes is one of the leading causes of premature laptop and console failure. A can of compressed air twice a year can add years to a machine.
• Run software updates promptly. Security patches matter. Performance updates matter. Install them as soon as they are available.
• Use a case and screen protector. Boring advice. Still the highest return on investment for phone and tablet longevity.
• Choose repairable devices when you buy. Modular designs and accessible batteries make a real difference over a five to ten year horizon.

When something does break, your first move should not be a trip to the carrier store or the manufacturer's service desk. It should be a visit to your local independent repair shop, who will give you an honest answer about cost and feasibility.

When a Device Truly Is Done

Sometimes a device really is at the end of the road. Water damage past saving. A logic board that is genuinely fried beyond what makes economic sense to fix. A model so old that parts are no longer in circulation.

When that day comes, two things matter.

First, do not let the device sit in a drawer. The moment a device gets stashed away "just in case," it almost never comes back out. The clock starts the day you stop using it. Move it within thirty days, while you still remember it exists. Every drawer-stored device is rare earths, copper, and cobalt sitting idle when they could be re-entering the supply chain.

Second, donate or recycle it responsibly. eWaste Warriors accepts working and broken devices, refurbishes what is salvageable, gets working tech into the hands of people who need it, and routes the rest through certified recyclers who actually recover materials rather than ship them overseas.

Host a Collection Drive

If you run a company, an HOA, a faith community, a school, or any kind of group that gathers people in one place, consider hosting an eWaste Warriors collection drive. They are easy to organize, they create a clear and trusted destination for the old phones and laptops piling up in employees' and neighbors' drawers, and they often surface working devices that can be refurbished and put back to work for someone who needs them.

Office collection drives are particularly powerful. The corporate and personal devices that come out of them tend to be in better shape and richer in recoverable materials than what comes through general e-waste streams. If a collection drive sounds like something you want to organize, reach out to eWaste Warriors directly through their site.

If recycling is the only option, look specifically for an R2-certified recycler. That certification exists because the alternative is the global e-waste trade I described earlier, the one that quite literally poisons communities in the developing world while letting valuable materials escape any meaningful recovery.

The Action Hiding in Plain Sight

The Critical Minerals panel I sat in on last Monday was filled with serious people working on serious solutions. Responsible sourcing. Circular supply chains. Multistakeholder partnerships. Robotic disassembly. Domestic processing capacity. Whey-based gold sponges. Every one of those efforts matters, and the people building them are doing important work.

But there is a faster, simpler action available right now to every person reading this, regardless of which side of the climate-or-security framing you came in on.

Keep your devices working longer. Repair when you can, and consult an independent repair professional rather than the company trying to sell you a new one. Donate when the device is truly done. Choose independent repair shops over the upgrade treadmill the carriers and manufacturers keep pushing.

Every smartphone you keep for one extra year is a smartphone that does not need to be manufactured. Every laptop battery you replace instead of replacing the whole laptop is cobalt and dysprosium that stay where they are most useful, in a working device, instead of being mined fresh from a supply chain we do not fully control. Every cracked tablet screen you fix instead of trading in is a small but real refusal of a system designed to keep selling you the same thing over and over while the materials inside flow through one country's processing facilities.

That is climate action. That is supply chain resilience. That is national security at the household level. That is consumer power in its most direct and underestimated form.

That is repair.

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