It was 4th grade where I got my first introduction to the periodic table. Our teacher had a tradition of playing Tom Lehrer in the background during free time. Looking back, an interesting choice — 10-year-olds were humming along to Poisoning Pigeons in the Park. But the real gem was The Elements Song, Lehrer’s tongue-twisting recital of the periodic table. Hidden in the lyrics was a group of elements affectionately known as the rare earths.
Rare earth elements, or REEs, are comprised of 17 elements so unusual they are boxed off on their own in the periodic table. And here’s the kicker: they’re not actually rare, despite what their name may suggest. They’re actually found everywhere in the Earth’s crust. The “rare earth” label goes back to 18th-century Sweden, when miners in Ytterby uncovered an unknown “rare” black ore that dissolved in acid, affectionately coined as “earth.” Later in the century, scientists discovered yttrium, ytterbium, terbium, and erbium from this black mass of unknown — and set chemists on a naming spree that proves we were not the most creative branders.
Fast forward 300 years and REEs are suddenly front and center — the “it-girl” group of elements. Why? Because they power everything from electric vehicles to fighter jets. They are indispensable to modern life, and even more to modern security.
Scarcity by the Bag: Putting Rare Earths in Perspective
We’ve established that REEs aren’t geologically rare, but they feel rare because of how dispersed they are in ores. You won’t find a mine full of single rare earth elements the same way you would, say, iron or copper. Their abundance is measured in parts per million (ppm) within the earth’s crust, not percentages.
Take neodymium (Nd), critical for EV motors. The U.S. Geological Survey pegs its abundance at ~42 ppm. To put that into perspective:
- If each coffee bean represented an element in the Earth’s crust, you’d need to go through about 12 average bags of beans before you’d expect to find a single “neodymium bean.”
- Scale that up to the 1–2 kg of NdFeB magnets inside an EV motor, and you’d need 25,000 to 49,000 bags of coffee just to source enough Nd.
Now, the truth is more nuanced. In practice, neodymium and other REEs occur at much higher concentrations in specific ores. But the metaphor captures why these elements are both common and frustrating: they’re everywhere and nowhere. Extracting, refining, and separating them is expensive, messy, and technologically difficult.
China’s Grip and Effects on Defense
And here’s where geopolitics enter the picture. While rare earths are distributed widely in the Earth’s crust, China dominates the midstream—the refining and separation steps that turn raw ore into high-purity REEs. Estimates suggest China controls 60–70% of mining and over 85–90% of refining/separation capacity, especially for the heavy rare earths like dysprosium and terbium that are crucial for high-temperature magnets.
But China’s dominance comes at a cost. Rare earth separation is notoriously waste-intensive and polluting. Traditional solvent-extraction plants generate large volumes of toxic wastewater, produce acidic tailings, and emit greenhouse gases. For every ton of rare earth oxides refined, studies estimate up to 2,000 tons of waste rock and significant CO₂ emissions. China has shouldered those environmental costs for decades—one reason Western economies ceded this midstream step in the first place. However, that story is quickly changing.
- In April 2025, China restricted exports on seven rare earths, a move widely interpreted as targeting the U.S. defense supply chain.
- The U.S. Department of Defense responded by accelerating funding for domestic projects, including taking a major stake ($400M) in MP Materials.
- At the global level, the G7 has debated price floors and export controls to counter China’s dominance. The EU has even proposed stock piling measures to improve strategic autonomy.
Just within the U.S. defense sector, fighter jets, missile guidance systems, radars, lasers—all depend on rare earth magnets, phosphors, and catalysts. Nearly 80% of U.S. weapons systems have rare earths embedded in them. In a world of rising geopolitical tension, whoever controls REEs controls a critical choke point in modern defense.
Breaking the Bottleneck with Innovation
It’s tempting to think of rare earths as a permanent monopoly with the rest of the world locked out but that picture is already starting to change, thanks to a wave of innovation across the supply chain. Start-ups are reimagining each critical step: how we source, extract, separate, and even refine rare earths into usable metals.
- Cyclic Materials starts at the very front end by rethinking feedstock. Instead of blasting fresh rock, Cyclic harvests critical metals from end-of-life products like EV motors and consumer electronics. Their proprietary processes—MagCycle and REEPure—dismantle magnets, strip out the REEs, and recover copper, aluminum, nickel, cobalt, and steel. This multi-metal approach improves economics and reduces waste. Cyclic has also partnered with Glencore to supply recycled copper and with Circulor to ensure traceability across the value chain. Their expansion into Mesa, Arizona signals that recycling at industrial scale could become a major new source of North American REE feedstock.
- REEGen is innovating in extraction by replacing harsh chemistry with biology. Conventional hydrometallurgy depends on concentrated acids at high temperature, generating toxic wastewater. REEGen instead uses engineered microbes that produce organic acids to leach REEs out of ores, slags, and industrial residues at room temperature. Once dissolved, their bio-separation system uses ligands and immobilized microbes to selectively capture the target elements. With a fresh $1.1M National Science Foundation grant recently awarded, their bio-hydrometallurgical approach could slash waste, lower energy use, and make recovery possible from lower-grade or difficult feedstocks that traditional methods ignore.
- REETec focuses on the midstream bottleneck: separation. Rare earths are chemically similar and usually require thousands of solvent extraction steps to separate, creating rivers of chemical waste. REETec’s process is different. Drawing from its patents, the company uses specialized stationary phases and ligands that enable high-selectivity separation with fewer solvents and steps. They claim this reduces CO₂ emissions by up to 90% compared to conventional methods, while recycling nearly all consumables. Backed by LKAB and TechMet, REEtec is scaling up an industrial plant at Herøya, Norway that could supply separated REEs to European magnet makers with purity reaching 99.999%.
- Phoenix Tailings may be taking the boldest step of all. Starting with tailings, coal ash, and other residues, Phoenix uses molten-salt electrochemistry to directly extract and reduce rare earths into pure metals. This bypasses the oxide stage and collapses two bottlenecks at once—separation and refining. Their Exeter, New Hampshire refinery, expected to come online in 2025, will be the first U.S. refining facility capable of producing metals like neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium, and terbium at scale.
Together, these companies illustrate that the future of rare earths doesn’t hinge only on digging new mines. It depends on building smarter, cleaner, and more resilient supply chains—from recycling and bioleaching to advanced separation and direct metal production. Each start-up chips away at a different choke point, and together they paint a picture of how the West could loosen China’s grip on these critical elements.
So, what if this bottleneck isn’t a permanent constraint but a temporary imbalance?
If recycling scales, if midstream separation technologies mature, and if policy continues to underwrite risk, China’s leverage could erode dramatically within the decade. In that world, rare earths would still be essential—but not necessarily the geopolitical weapon its being made as today.
The paradox of rare earths, then, is this: they are geologically common, technologically indispensable, and politically volatile. The challenge ahead is less about whether we have enough cerium or neodymium, and more about whether we can build the supply chains to make them accessible without relying on a single place.
