Modern Mining’s US e-waste expansion: process, recovery and supply notes for engineers
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on MINING.com
30 Second Briefing
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.
Technical Brief
- Process flow mimics mineral processing: cutting, grinding, shredding, then gravity separation to liberate metallic fractions.
- Gravity circuits separate plastics, fibreglass and other non-metallics, yielding a metallic powder for assay.
- “Aqueous purification” uses selective chemistry to isolate and enrich individual metals into saleable commodity products.
- Only a small melting step is required at the back end, avoiding new large-scale smelting units.
- Greenville, North Carolina plant evolved from lab tests to pilot, then industrial-scale demonstration before commercialisation.
Our Take
The International Energy Agency’s projection that critical‑mineral recycling could cut new mine development for copper and cobalt by up to 40% by 2050 aligns with recent coverage of record copper prices, suggesting that secondary supply from e‑waste could become a material hedge against high‑cost greenfield copper projects in the US.
Modern Mining’s plan to roll out roughly one US plant per year over five years sits against a backdrop of copper and aluminium price volatility in our database, meaning plant siting in regions like North Carolina may increasingly be optimised around grid power costs and logistics for high‑value scrap streams rather than proximity to traditional ore bodies.
With MINING.COM’s broader 2026 coverage showing copper, lithium, nickel and rare earths driving much of the valuation swings for majors, a domestic e‑waste hub in Greenville, North Carolina positions Modern Mining to serve OEMs and data‑centre operators looking to de‑risk supply chains for these same metals without adding greenfield permitting exposure in the USA.
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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