U.S. looks to recycle rare earths as imports stay high
Washington is backing rare-earth recycling as the U.S. stays more than 95% import reliant and recovers only limited amounts from old batteries and magnets.
The Energy Department pledged up to $134 million in December 2025 to strengthen domestic rare-earth supply chains, from extraction and separation to processing materials into metals and magnets. The United States is more than 95% net import reliant for rare-earth compounds and metals.
Limited quantities of rare earths are recovered from batteries, permanent magnets and fluorescent lamps. In its 2025 Mineral Commodity Summary, the USGS estimated U.S. rare-earth imports at $170 million in 2024, down 11% from $186 million in 2023.
The Defense Department in March 2024 had awarded more than $439 million since 2020 to build domestic rare-earth supply chains and warned that the country can no longer rely on overseas single points of failure for critical components. Congress directed the Pentagon under the 2023 National Defense Authorization Act to assess and implement procurement requirements for rare earths and other critical materials.
Mining rare earths has significant effects on water and soil quality, creates waste and requires heavy energy use. Work by the Energy Department’s Critical Materials Institute, Seagate and the Global Electronics Council helped create NSF/ANSI 426-2018, the first known standard to incentivize recycled rare earths in servers. Dell later used a closed-loop process that diverted 660 pounds of magnet material from landfills and helped produce 25,000 hard drives, with a scalable process that could use more than 8,000 pounds a year.
The Energy Department said only 17.4% of global e-scrap was collected and recycled in 2019, leaving 83% discarded along with $57 billion in raw material value. Recycling NdFeB magnets from e-waste has emerged as a way to reduce dependence on China and cut environmental damage, but the field faces a fragmented recycling value chain, complex feedstocks and rapidly changing end markets.
On July 15, 2025, MP Materials and Apple announced a $500 million partnership to produce recycled rare-earth magnets in the United States, with feedstock from post-industrial and end-of-life magnets and production at MP’s Fort Worth, Texas, facility using recycled material processed at Mountain Pass, California. The Energy Department launched the E-SCRAP prize in January 2025 with up to $4 million in cash awards.
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