The Materials Are Already Above Ground. We Just Joined the Coalition Building the System to Recover Them.

A couple of days ago we wrote about the wave of retired hardware the world is producing — 62 million tonnes of e-waste a year, roughly the mass of the entire Great Wall of China, rising about five times faster than our documented ability to recycle it. We framed it as a problem to be caught.

It's also something else: the largest reserve of already-refined critical materials on the planet, and almost none of it is being tapped.

The copper, gold, and rare earth elements packed into that stream have already been mined, smelted, and refined once — at enormous cost and environmental impact. Recovering them doesn't require opening a new mine or renegotiating a foreign supply contract. The materials are already here, above ground, in our buildings and our landfills. Yet recycled electronics meet only about 1% of global rare earth demand today. We keep digging new holes while a richer, cleaner source sits in a drawer.

That's the gap the Circular Supply Chain Coalition exists to close. And as of today, Layer IQ is a member.

Why This Is a Systems Problem, Not a Technology Problem

It's tempting to think material recovery is waiting on some breakthrough in chemistry or shredding. It isn't. The harder problem is connective tissue — the system that moves a device from the moment someone's done with it to the moment its materials re-enter a manufacturing line as feedstock.

That system barely exists, and consumer electronics are the most fragmented, hardest-to-track part of it. Think about everything that moves through a Goodwill: someone there has to decide, device by device, what each one is and what to do with it — usually with no information to go on. The same is true once anything is collected, by anyone. No one reliably knows what it is, what it's made of, what it's still worth, or where it should go. So the default is the lowest-common-denominator outcome: shred everything, recover a fraction, and lose both the devices that should have been reused and the visibility into the materials inside the ones that shouldn't.

The world still runs on a linear-materials economy at exactly the moment that model has become incompatible with economic and geopolitical reality. Critical materials stay concentrated in a handful of foreign suppliers. Companies stay exposed to leverage, volatility, and shortage. Building localized, circular supply chains isn't a sustainability nicety anymore — it's supply-chain resilience and national security.

The Coalition, and Where It Starts

The Circular Supply Chain Coalition, powered by Pyxera Global, is building a scalable, effective material-recovery system that strengthens global supply chains. Its premise is blunt and correct: already-extracted, already-refined critical materials are not waste. They are an economic opportunity and a strategic asset, and the job is to design the integrated system — from post-use collection through reintegration into manufacturing — that treats them that way.

That means convening the players who have never been wired together: refurbishers, OEMs, processors, logistics providers, governments, and community enterprises, around shared infrastructure that turns fragmentation into a functioning supply network.

The initial focus is urban mining — and specifically the hardest, most overlooked part of it: the front end. Most of the value in any recovery system is decided before a device is ever processed, by whether it gets collected responsibly in the first place. So the early work is about incentivizing ordinary people to handle their old electronics as the resource they are, rather than tossing them in a landfill or a junk drawer, and getting those devices into a stream where their value can actually be recovered.

Pyxera Global has spent decades doing exactly this kind of cross-sector, multi-stakeholder work — across more than 110 countries — for partners that include 3M, FedEx, JPMorgan Chase, NBCUniversal, and SAP. It's good company to keep, and it's the right organization to convene a system this complicated.

What Layer IQ Brings

A recovery system runs on two things: the information moving through it and the incentives moving material into it. Layer IQ provides both — the rails the whole ecosystem connects to.

The information rail answers the questions every participant has to resolve fast, for every device: What is this? What is it made of? What is it still worth? And where should it go to recover the most value — as a working asset, as parts, or as feedstock? Our platform, Asset IQ, brings together the data that has always been scattered across the lifecycle so the full financial, operational, and material value of every asset is visible in one place, then routes each one to its highest-value, highest-recovery path.

The financial rail is what makes the system move. Information tells you what something is worth; incentive is what actually gets it collected, sorted, and recovered instead of buried. We connect that value across the entire chain — OEMs, enterprises, disposition and recovery partners, material and carbon markets — and, critically, all the way down to the individual.

That last link is where most of the industry stops, and we don't. Our tagline is Asset Intelligence for Circular IT — and a fast-growing share of that IT sits in the hands of ordinary consumers, the most disconnected part of the entire stream. Urban mining only scales if a regular person has a reason to hand over an old laptop instead of dropping it in a drawer. Putting real, visible value behind that choice — and the information to act on it — is exactly the connectivity our platform was built to deliver, even in a setting this fragmented. That's what we're bringing to the coalition: the rails that turn scattered retired hardware, corporate and consumer alike, into a predictable source of supply.

Why It Matters

Material recovery sits at the intersection of the three forces we keep coming back to: sustainability, supply-chain resilience, and national security. Done poorly, retired electronics leach toxins into the ground and ship strategic materials to landfill. Done well, they re-enter the economy as the cleanest, nearest-to-hand source of the materials modern industry depends on.

The Circular Supply Chain Coalition is building the system to make the second outcome the default. We're proud to bring the intelligence layer to that work, and to do it alongside Pyxera Global and the partners already in this fight.

The materials are already above ground. The work now is building the system that puts them back to use — and we're glad to be part of it.

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Layer IQ is an Ecosystem Partner of the Circular Supply Chain Coalition, powered by Pyxera Global. Learn more at circularsupplychain.org and pyxeraglobal.org.

E-waste and rare earth figures cited from the UN's Global E-waste Monitor 2024 (UNITAR / ITU).