How a change in recycling can beat China’s rare earths monopoly
The article discusses the potential for the United States to reduce its reliance on China's rare earths monopoly through improved recycling practices. It highlights the importance of extracting valuable rare earth elements from electronic waste, which is often discarded. The Department of Energy is promoting research and funding to enhance domestic recycling efforts and ensure a reliable supply chain for these critical minerals.
- ▪China currently dominates the rare earth minerals market, exporting over 90 percent of these crucial elements.
- ▪The U.S. Department of Energy has announced a $500 million funding opportunity to encourage research on recycling and processing domestic critical minerals.
- ▪California has implemented a law to prevent the sale of products labeled as recyclable unless they are regularly collected and processed for recycling.
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| Original publisher | Washington Examiner |
| Canonical URL | https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/restoring-america/courage-strength-optimism/4574713/how-change-in-recycling-beats-china-rare-earths-monopoly/ |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 10:00:00 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T10:01:52.830Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T10:20:27.722Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | MdZFouOjWW-N |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
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| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
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Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
The Trump-Xi summit in Beijing ended without any renewed disruptions in trade. Trump held back on new tariffs while China’s endorsement of “strategic stability” means, for now, it will continue to export rare earth minerals — elements China dominates to the tune of 90-plus percent and that are crucial to the electronics in your pocket. But putting a tourniquet on exports of lanthanum, europium, and gadolinium, among 17 rare earths, remains an option for Beijing. Coping with this threat means renewed rare earth mining in the United States. And, surprisingly, it also means changing what we put out in those blue recycling bins each week on our curbsides.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Washington Examiner.
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