JB Jaso

written by Deborah Dull, on site at GreenBiz 2026   I spent today in a room full of people who think about waste for a living. And the word that kept coming up had nothing to do with recycling. It was sovereignty. Here is the situation. The United States imports 95% of its critical mineral supply. Lithium, cobalt, rare earth elements, the stuff inside every battery, every semiconductor, every electric motor. We do not make it, we do not mine much of it, and we do not control the supply chain that delivers it. That is not an energy policy problem. That is a national security problem. Now here is the part that should make you put down your coffee. A ton of smartphones contains dramatically more gold than a ton of mined ore. We are talking about concentrations that make urban mining look like a gold rush compared to digging in the ground. And yet the recovery rate for those materials, once a phone leaves its first owner, drops to around 13%. We are losing roughly 80% of the value sitting in devices right now, in drawers, in closets, in landfills. E-waste is also the fastest growing waste stream…

Execution Is Everything At Manifest 2026, Scott Luton spoke with Aadil Kazmi, Head of AI at Infios, to discuss the next chapter of intelligent supply chain execution. Infios provides an integrated suite of supply chain execution software: order management, warehouse management, and transportation management – all running on a single data model. “When a supply chain runs on a single data model, you can make better decisions,” Kazmi explained. Fragmented systems require expensive data lakes and normalization efforts before even basic BI is possible. An integrated ecosystem simplifies intelligence from the start. For Kazmi, AI is not about flashy demos. But rather, it is about execution. The most advanced technologies mean little if companies cannot execute faster, smarter, and more resiliently in the real world.   Disruption Isn’t Going Away Reflecting on 2025, Kazmi did not sugarcoat reality. Ports closed. Trade wars escalated. Wildfires disrupted domestic production. Shipping lanes tightened. “We don’t believe that supply chain disruptions are going away anytime soon,” he said. Volatility is becoming the baseline, not the exception. But what is changing in 2026 is mindset. Kazmi describes what he calls the “Amazon effect for AI.” Just as Amazon forced retailers to rethink last-mile execution a…