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February 14, 2021

This Week on Supply Chain Now: February 1st – 5th

Hot off the Press! We’ve got all the latest news in supply chain this week right here. Read up and make sure you’re in the know about everything happening here on Supply Chain Now, including all the latest podcasts, livestreams, & more!   On Monday, Supply Chain Now hosts Jeff Miller (Supply Chain Is The Business) and Jamin Alvidrez (Logistics and Beyond!) sat down with Wayne Cragg – a professional driver, photographer and social media influencer.     On Tuesday, Bobby Holland from U.S. Bank and Frank Hurst of Roadrunner Freight shared the results of the on the Q4 2020 report, interpreting what they may mean for the economy and the shipping industry in the short and longer term with Greg White and Scott Luton     On Wednesday, Mario Rivera of ID Logistics joined the Supply Chain Now podcast to talk about creative, real-world problem solving with Co-hosts Greg White and Scott Luton   On Thursday, Scott, Greg, & Karin sat down with Lee Klaskow from Bloomberg Intelligence, one of the leading industry analysts, especially as it relates to logistics and transportation   On Friday, Scott Luton tackled a variety of developments including from this past week on the…
waste to value
March 25, 2026

The Geopolitics of Junk

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…