Environment Subcommittee Holds Hearing to Examine Legislation Supporting Domestic Critical Mineral Recovery and Recycling
WASHINGTON, D.C. – Today, Congressman Gary Palmer (AL-06), Chairman of the Subcommittee on Environment, led a hearing titled Trash to Treasure: Examining Legislation to Support Domestic Critical Mineral Recovery and Recycling.
“Removing regulatory barriers to a more robust domestic recycling industry could allow us to recover more of these minerals from products already in the United States.” said Chairman Palmer. “Deliberate federal coordination has never been more important, with adversaries such as China demonstrating that they are willing and able to weaponize their control of crucial supply chains. Securing our fragile supply chains requires coordination across the entire Federal government, and it is important for EPA to have a seat at the table.”
Watch the full hearing here.
Below are key excerpts from today’s hearing:
Congressman John Joyce, M.D. (PA-13): “The legislation under consideration today represents another step forward in this committee's ongoing efforts to improve America's domestic critical mineral supply chain while we work to onshore and scale up domestic mining and processing of these materials. Legislation like this will help in our efforts to recover the materials that would otherwise be discarded. With the equipment used for advanced manufacturing and precision agriculture, both very important in Pennsylvania's 13th congressional district, we will continue to see more waste generated that contains valuable critical materials. We need to develop both a strategy and the capacity to recover these materials, rather than sending the waste for processing to China, who continues to dominate the supply chain.”
Congressman Bob Latta (OH-05): “I've been to several contaminated sites and usually what you see is they come in, they move all the dirt out, it’s taken to some other hazardous waste area, then might be put into a pit or some kind of a lined area and forgotten forever. On that end, how should the EPA address and incentivize some kind of a process where we can go in and make sure that we're recovering these really critical minerals that's in that soil?” Mr. Buckingham: “A technology like ours can effectively recover over 90 percent of the uranium and vanadium and to just 20% of the original mass. In some cases, it's economic to take that material, recycle it, put it to productive use, convert it to u308 and enter the nuclear fuel cycle. The economics are a major driver in determining which options to pursue. And if EPA had that framework, where they were able to value the minerals that could be recovered, that would drastically change the economics and how they approach cleanup decisions.”
Congresswoman Mariannette Miller-Meeks, M.D. (IA-01): “We have the material. We have the technology. We have the need. And yet we are still shipping critical minerals overseas to be processed and sold back to us. The United States built a recycling system around one question: how do we safely dispose of this? That was the right question for its time. It's the wrong question for this moment. The materials flowing through our waste streams today are the same materials our defense sector, our grid, and our manufacturing base depend on. This is a question of energy security and industrial competitiveness. The market is already trying to solve this problem. Commercial actors are structuring contracts to recover and reuse these materials domestically.”
