DOE’s $69M E-Waste Funding Signals a Shift in Critical Minerals Strategy

The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a Notice of Funding Opportunity (NOFO) of up to $69 million for innovative processing technologies that can ensure a more secure and affordable supply of critical minerals and materials (CMMs) foundational to energy, security, and industrial competitiveness. Elements like silicon, gallium, and neodymium are important to electronics and they are also deemed critical. This NOFO aims to direct funding to accelerate industry-led partnerships to prototype and pilot technologies that will, in part, ensure the recovery, refining, and production of CMMs from post-industrial and post-consumer scrap, like waste electrical and electronic equipment, known as e-waste. 

E-waste is a materials problem that engineers shouldn’t ignore. This NOFO makes a blunt point that should matter to everyone responsible for designing electronic systems: today, we are quietly bleeding CMMs out of U.S. supply chains at end-of-life. Nearly all CMMs in e-waste are lost! Across the U.S. e-waste value chain, only about 2% of CMMs are recovered domestically. The rest are removed from the domestic value chain with about 44% exported and about 54% landfilled before they can be recovered, refined, and reintroduced into manufacturing. 

What’s striking is how explicitly this NOFO reframes e-waste as a resource and not a waste. Rather than positioning it as an environmental liability, the U.S. DOE treats e-waste as a resource like virgin raw materials from mines. E-waste can be mined domestically. Electronics-heavy systems like electric drivetrains and power electronics become future CMM inventories. Recovering these materials is functionally equivalent to expanding domestic production capacity, without having to locate and open a new mine. Rare earth magnets, aluminum, copper, and other CMMs essential to clean energy technologies and future electronics innovations are essentially at-the-ready if we can expand domestic production capacity from our stock of e-waste. 

While this funding opportunity considers many CMM recovery technology solutions, its implications land squarely upstream, at the design stage. Today’s losses are downstream consequences of upstream design decisions. Adhesives, mixed alloys, plastics, and highly integrated assemblies can defeat disassembly, materials separation, and recovery. As a result, shredding of e-waste becomes the dominant management technique.  

Fixing upstream failures is critical to unlocking downstream potential. Designing for recovery – or designing for circularity to include recyclability, repurposing, remanufacturing – is a supply chain issue, not just a sustainability “nice to have.” When does losing valuable materials make sense? Let’s design electronics with the end-of-life in mind. 

This NOFO underscores the opportunity for industry to play a leading role in advancing scalable technologies for critical mineral and material recovery from electronics. While the Global Electronics Association is not pursuing participation in this specific funding opportunity, we remain highly interested in engaging with companies and consortia working in this space. We encourage organizations developing relevant recovery, refining, and circular design technologies to connect with us to explore collaboration on future DOE funding opportunities and broader initiatives focused on strengthening domestic CMM recovery from electronics.