Amermin–Ulterra critical minerals recycling: process and supply insights for miners
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
US recycler Amermin and Ulterra Drilling Technologies are extending their critical minerals recycling partnership to handle Ulterra’s waste streams from Argentina and Canada, on top of existing US volumes. The Texas-based firms already process more than 21 waste streams, including tungsten, cobalt, nickel, manganese, blast media, and synthetic and industrial diamond, and recycled over 1.4 million pounds of Ulterra material in 2025. Amermin is using an $11.5 million US Department of Energy grant to scale processing so end-of-life drilling and tooling inputs can be returned as manufacturing-grade feedstock.
Technical Brief
- Amermin’s flowsheet handles at least 21 distinct waste streams, including tungsten, cobalt, copper, nickel and zinc.
- Precious and hard-phase recovery includes silver, carbon, iron, manganese, blast media, and synthetic/industrial diamond fractions.
- DOE’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management is the funding channel for the US$11.5 million scale-up grant.
- Recovered outputs are specified as “manufacturing-grade inputs”, implying metallurgical quality suitable for direct remanufacturing.
- Supply-chain risk focus is on “geopolitically complex” sources, with recycling framed as an allied-supply alternative.
- Ulterra’s drilling-tool waste becomes a controlled secondary ore stream, reducing primary mining demand for several critical metals.
- Similar drill-tool recycling schemes could integrate with mine-site scrap segregation to pre-condition material for such refineries.
Our Take
The involvement of the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Fossil Energy and Carbon Management signals that Amermin’s recycling of tungsten, cobalt and other critical minerals is being treated as a strategic supply-security play, not just a waste-management exercise, which could ease future permitting and grant access in the USA.
Recycling more than 21 distinct waste streams into critical minerals and blast media positions Amermin and Ulterra as potential suppliers into both mining and industrial-abrasive markets, giving them a hedge against commodity price volatility in individual metals such as nickel, copper or zinc.
Within our 1201 Mining stories, only a subset of critical-minerals coverage involves large-scale secondary recovery; this 1.4-million-pound recycling effort in 2025 suggests that, for some operators, urban/industrial mining is starting to approach the materiality of smaller primary projects, especially for niche inputs like industrial diamond and rare earths.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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