Modern Mining is preparing to commercialise its Greenville, North Carolina e-waste plant, which shreds, gravity-separates and then uses “aqueous purification” chemistry to recover gold, silver, palladium and copper without large-scale incineration or new smelting capacity. The move comes as President Trump’s July use of the Defense Production Act enables export restrictions on industrial waste containing critical minerals, aiming to keep higher-than-ore-grade electronic scrap within US borders. Modern Mining plans a distributed network of modular plants—targeting roughly one new facility per year over five years—to build a domestic secondary-metals supply chain alongside conventional mining.

Copper is trading near a record $14,500/t as the LME August contract’s premium over September blows out to $370/t and cash-to-three-month spreads hit $434/t amid a 42-day drawdown in exchange stocks to 204,975 t, nearly half already earmarked for withdrawal. Traders are diverting metal to the US ahead of potential 15–30% tariffs on refined copper and to China as smelters cut output following the DRC’s concentrate export ban, while Chilean supply remains constrained around 5.5 Mt/y and Indonesia’s 342,000 t/y Gresik smelter is offline. BMI now pegs 2026 prices near $13,500/t with “strong upside risks”, as shorts on the LME face the prospect of a warehouse bidding war.

Faraday Copper is acquiring BHP’s former San Manuel mine in Arizona, consolidating it with the adjacent Copper Creek project into a district-scale copper play targeting more than 18 billion lb. of contained metal and potential output of about 150,000 tonnes of copper per year over 40+ years. The San Manuel package includes a past-producing operation that milled roughly 800 million tonnes at 0.66% Cu, 109 sq. km of private land, existing rail, gas and power, and a water-supply agreement, but no surviving core, forcing at least 23,000 metres of confirmation drilling starting Q4 2026. Faraday plans two open pits and two underground mines using shared processing and infrastructure on the rehabilitated San Manuel site, funded initially from its C$126 million cash and term deposits, with BHP to hold 30% on a fully diluted basis and a right to a board seat.