Alexa Cheater

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…

Stay up to date on all the latest conversations, interviews, and episodes we released this week here at Supply Chain Now! We started this week off with an episode of Digital Transformers with host Kevin L. Jackson. During this episode, Kevin sits down with three digital experts to discuss new approaches to establishing trust and provenance within a supply chain that is increasingly both digital and physical. This episode features Dustin McIntire the CTO of COMSovereign Holding Corporation. Eric Adolphe the CEO of Forward Edge-AI and Joshua Pendrick the CEO and Co-founder of Rypplzz. For Monday’s This Week In Business History episode, Kelly Barner talks about the political act that led to an increase in organized crime and the end of the Great Depression. On Tuesday, we released a new episode of Supply Chain Now with host Scott Luton and guest host Allison Giddens. They welcomed the head of Global Supply Chain for Peloton, Jennifer McKeehan, to the show. They discussed how the hybrid work environment is allowing the best leaders to shine by continuing to build strong, meaningful relationships, and much more. This week we released an episode of Logistics With Purpose with hosts Enrique Alvarez and Kristi Porter.…