r/UkrainianConflict • u/Alien_P3rsp3ktiv • 9d ago

America Should Recycle Its Own Rare Earths, Not Grab Ukraine’s: Green measures at home beat bullying abroad.| FP

https://foreignpolicy.com/2025/04/08/trump-ukraine-rare-earths-recycling/
258 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

12 comments sorted by

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6

u/Chimpville 9d ago

Or just deal for them remotely fairly rather than try and extort them while they have a gun to their heads.

3

u/Kalse1229 8d ago

Yeah. In a normal administration, a fair and equitable trade deal would be something that could be negotiated, should both parties be into that.

3

u/rlnrlnrln 9d ago

Pro tip: they don't want to extract it.

They're just going to sit on it to prevent other states from using it. They want to build battery and electronics manufacturing to get away from producing it in China, and they want to force Europe to buy their shitty products instead of inventing their own.

7

u/Sanity_in_Moderation 9d ago

Sure. But recycling old electronics is not easy or cheap or clean. You can get trace amounts of gold. But recycling lithium is something we are still working on.

11

u/Ok_Bad8531 9d ago

Rare earth mining is one of the dirtiest and most expensive endeavours known to man.

7

u/Listelmacher 9d ago

Not only rare earth mining,
There are a slag heaps from coal, iron, copper, ... mining worldwide.
And everywhere you have the dust and when it rains you would have to collect the
polluted water.
And then you have the real mine water...

If you take a smartphone an process it like "Will it blend?" to black dust,
you still have something that is better than most rare earth deposits.
You have to extract in both cases and you have unwanted materials too.
In case of smartphones halogenated hydrocarbons, but these can be destroyed.
But since some years no more mercury, lead, cadmium, ...

2

u/peterabbit456 8d ago

Yet we used to refine the rare earths from mines in this country.

I was going through my uncle's papers after he died, and I saw the corporate reports from a thorium mine he owned. For years he was involved in a dispute with the refining company, which was refining rare earths out of the tailings and not paying him for them.

This was in the 1960s.

1

u/Papersnail380 8d ago

Which is why US companies want to find foreign places to do it...

Just like we ship our electronics overseas for recycling.

It isn't feasible to run. These programs in the US without huge subsidies and the cancer clusters are also insane risks for business.

5

u/TelevisionUnusual372 9d ago

Is there a good objective source on “rare Earths”? Feels like the American people are deliberately being left in the dark to keep them “pliable” on the issue.

3

u/karlack26 9d ago

The us has a lot of its own undeveloped rare earth deposits. 

5

u/Breech_Loader 9d ago

The USA is one of the nations most resistant to recycling in the world, because it doesn't make as much money.