Dive Brief:

• A new tool from e-Stewards and Bloom ESG aims to measure and track critical materials diverted from disposal. It’s an effort to help electronics recyclers, IT asset disposition companies and their corporate customers boost domestic supply chains and meet sustainability goals.
• e-Stewards, a certification body for electronics recyclers and refurbishers, partnered last year with sustainability consultant Bloom ESG to build an environmental benefits calculator for electronics recyclers. The calculator originally helped measure avoided carbon emissions and other sustainability metrics, and a new expansion now also measures how recyclers and companies divert critical materials from disposal through recycling or refurbishment. 
• The “critical metals conserved” metric aims to help users better quantify specific recycled or reused materials such as copper, steel, aluminum, gold, silver and palladium. The tool will expand to track lithium, cobalt and other rare earth elements in coming months.

Dive Insight:

In the United States, efforts to boost U.S. domestic supply chains for critical minerals used in electronics, batteries and magnets has become a key economic and manufacturing priority. That’s partly because countries like China corner the market on certain minerals used to manufacture those items.

In the last few months, that conversation has accelerated due to geopolitical factors such as tariffs and the war in Iran, which has strained supply chains for many industries. 

That has spurred calls for more investments in the electronics recycling industry, especially as organizations such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimate there’s $67 billion in value locked inside “hibernating devices” such as forgotten laptops or old phones tossed into junk drawers around the world.  

Accurately measuring and accounting for these critical materials diverted from electronics is an important part of the equation, said Sebastian Foot, Bloom ESG’s co-founder. That’s because companies can’t know how much of the material is staying in domestic supply chains without the proper measurement tools, he said. 

Last year, when Bloom ESG and e-Stewards built their environmental impact calculator tool, they knew they’d expand it past carbon emission metrics to include other traceability capabilities. 

Adding a metric for critical materials measurement was the next logical step, in part because there are few existing tools to measure critical minerals conservation, Foot said. “We're just at this moment where critical mineral conservation is a lot more important than it perhaps has ever been,” Foot said.

The recent update to the e-Stewards and Bloom ESG calculator allows users to track critical materials in the specific devices they process. Users can input what they’re tracking — for instance, a load of 1,000 Dell laptops from a corporate customer — and see granular data on those assets’ ESG impacts depending on how they are processed.

To get that data, Bloom ESG relies on measurements from specific models of electronics instead of industry estimates. Foot said the team spent time pulling apart and weighing components of numerous devices while also pulling data from smelter operations, which typically compile metrics on the primary products they purify as well as other outputs like slag and emissions. 

“We really believe in doing robust calculations and not just doing guesswork,” said Jim Puckett, creator of the e-Stewards certification program. “The whole ESG industry, I think, is fraught with greenwashing potential. So we really want to make sure there's science behind us that we can back up.”

Recyclers who use the tool typically report the results to their customers, some of whom are major corporate clients that have public ESG or net zero goals to maintain, Foot said.

“Those companies still expect their suppliers, of which ITAD is part, to give them reliable, auditable data, but also to have a decarbonization plan of their own,” he said.

At the same time, many Fortune 500 companies have active business operations in Europe, where active regulatory frameworks like the European Union’s Corporate Sustainability Reporting Directive requires certain companies to disclose key ESG impacts. 

Puckett expects the tool to become more relevant as corporations, recyclers and ITAD companies face pressure to prove they’re contributing to supply chain resilience efforts by keeping valuable materials in the U.S. economy. 

“ESG has not faded away,” Puckett said, noting that while the Trump administration has targeted diversity and inclusion efforts, major corporations still care about other ESG metrics such as materials conservation and carbon emissions measurements. 

“If you don't have the metals, you can't do a lot of things in this world, and can't run industries of many types. So this goes far beyond feel-good environmental issues. It really is existential for a lot of these industries, certainly in electronics.” 

Puckett is also the founder of the Basel Action Network, which advocates for ending exports of polluting materials to lower-income countries. Many of these countries do not have the infrastructure to recycle the materials without serious environmental impacts, he said. 

“When you export to the global South, collection efforts don’t exist there, and you’re going to lose those materials,” he said.

He sees the environmental benefit calculator as a quantifiable way to show the value of responsibly recycling electronics through domestic markets instead of through exports that could harm other countries.

The industries that responsibly collect and recycle electronics will be front and center in that effort, he said. “This is a real business case for having a future in industry on this planet. We're going to need metals in the future.”