Britain is sitting on a growing supply of critical metals vital to its needs and is throwing them away.

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Every year, millions of tonnes of electronic waste are generated across the UK. Inside it are copper, gold, and other materials essential to modern life, from smartphones and data centres to electric vehicles and energy systems. Yet most of it leaves the country unprocessed, exported into global and often vulnerable supply chains that we do not control, especially during a period of global uncertainty.

At the same time, we import those very same metals back at a premium.

This is not just staggeringly inefficient. It is strategically short-sighted.

The UK’s Critical Minerals Strategy recognises that access to these materials will define economic competitiveness in the coming decades. It sets an aim for the UK to produce 10% of its needs through domestic primary production and 20% through recycling by 2035.

Advanced manufacturing, AI infrastructure, and the energy transition are all industries that depend on a reliable supply of critical metals. But there is a gap between recognising the problem and building the capability to solve it.

Today, the UK has no meaningful midstream metals recovery capability, meaning we can collect scrap but not process those materials into........

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