Critical Minerals: Reducing U.S. import reliance with substitution and recycling

Jimmc414 54 points 89 comments July 22, 2026
www.gao.gov · View on Hacker News

Discussion Highlights (6 comments)

lightedman

As someone that just got done doing a legal dig in a national park (inholding from the 1800s owned by a mining company, preparing to trade that land to the park for another mineral patent elsewhere) before you think of recycling you should perhaps think of developing your own domestic supply to recycle in the first place. And maybe introduce some technological improvements, too. Like portable millsites and leach pads so you don't fuck up the landscape with dead buildings and environmental waste. And maybe look into some chemical process improvements, like using DMSO instead of cyanide for leaching gold. Oh, and look into using Z-pinching for mining so we don't need explosives, we just need capacitors and metal tubes and drills to make precision tunnels to grab ore and leave more of the land intact.

tencentshill

If the government want to pay for my electronic scrap, great! I've got a box of 2nd-gen Intel CPUs, bidding starts at $3000.

seydor

Why is everyone preparing for war so hard

Veliladon

Start by banning disposable vapes. The sheer waste of lithium from those fucking devices is insane in 2026. We need every scrap of it we can get!

1970-01-01

Meta had the right idea of adding older RAM to their existing servers instead of just buying more. Shame how nobody really noticed. Reduce, REUSE, recycle is the correct order and what we should be doing. https://www.neowin.net/news/meta-is-reusing-old-ddr4-ram-in-... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48778956

maxglute

TFW "near term potential" F35s will get their radars.

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