Two Companies Just Did Something Smart With Our Electronic Waste

By Siam Sukkhee Trading Co., Ltd — 2026-07-22 — Waste360 (recycling/scrap)

ERI and Cyclic Materials signed a partnership on Tuesday. They're going to mine our electronic garbage for something valuable.

Not garbage, technically. Urban mining.

End-of-life electronics represent one of the largest untapped sources of rare earths and critical minerals in the world, yet many of these products are often discarded, and the critical materials within them are lost to waste streams. That's the straightforward problem. We throw out thousands of tonnes of old phones, computers, and server racks. Inside them sit neodymium, dysprosium, copper, aluminum. Magnets mostly. And we're just tossing it.

Here's what the deal actually does.

ERI, which processes more than one million pounds of electronic waste daily across eight U.S. recycling facilities, will use AI-driven hardware and software to isolate magnet-heavy components and ship the concentrated material to Cyclic Materials' hub in Mesa, Arizona, which can process up to 25,000 tons of end-of-life components annually. ERI pulls the magnets out and ships them to Arizona. Cyclic Materials processes them using something called MagCycle—recovers the rare earths, the copper, the aluminum. Cyclic is investing $82 million to establish a rare earth recycling campus in McBee, South Carolina, capable of processing 2,000 metric tons of magnet material per year with a planned expansion to 6,000 tons.

Actually, that's not quite right. Let me back up. The Arizona facility is their processing hub. South Carolina is where the new expansion goes.

Why does this matter to someone in the metals trade?

Because demand for rare earth elements continues to grow across vehicles, electronics, data centers and defense systems, and the U.S. has been working to build domestic supply chains for the magnet materials underpinning those technologies. Right now we're still dependent on foreign sources—mainly China, as it has been for two decades. Recycling closes that gap, or something like that. Recycling products already in circulation can produce domestic supplies faster than developing and permitting new mines.

The economics are shifting too.

The International Energy Agency projects that secondary supply of key energy-transition minerals could roughly double its share of global demand by 2040, with average recycling rates climbing from about 10% today to close to 20%. We're barely recycling any rare earths now. Most of what we recover is still from dedicated mining operations. But the baseline is so low that even small movements look dramatic.

For a metals and zinc trading company in Thailand watching global supply chains, this is worth noting. It's not about threat. It's about the fact that recycled feedstock is becoming a legitimate alternative stream. Hard drive magnets, wind turbine components, discarded data center equipment—these become sources. They become predictable. They become cheaper than virgin extraction in some cases.

ERI and Cyclic Materials will also jointly bid on government and commercial contracts to develop domestic circular supply chains for critical materials. So they're not just building processing capacity. They're going after government tenders. That's where the volume lives.

The shift is happening whether we notice or not.

Tags: metals trading Thailand 2026