Guest post By Emma Clark, CEO and Co-founder of Orivium, with an interesting look at leasing metals
From smartphones to servers, electric vehicles and AI chips, the engines of modern innovation rely on a relentless flow of rare earths and critical minerals. However, shockingly, these precious resources and most geopolitically fraught materials are still being treated as disposable.
A single tonne of discarded smartphones holds up to 300 times more gold than a tonne of mined ore. Yet in 2019, just 17.4% of global e-waste was formally recycled. The rest? Lost to landfills, shipped abroad, or incinerated. Meanwhile, demand continues to surge, with the EU expecting an 18-fold increase in lithium demand by 2030, and 5-fold increase in cobalt needed.
The future for Leasing Metals?
More than just an environmental crisis, this is becoming a strategic vulnerability, as Europe imports over 90% of its rare earth elements and is entirely dependent on external supply for several key minerals. As geopolitical tensions rise and global supply chains are stretched thin, this throwaway model is looking increasingly unsustainable and shortsighted.
This is where I’d like to introduce the idea of regenerative mining, a new supply chain paradigm that offers tech companies a smarter and more resilient way forward: leasing metals instead of owning them.
Imagine a world where tech companies don’t own the metals inside their devices, but instead, they lease them. Much like leasing a vehicle fleet or cloud servers, this model treats metals as strategic assets that are accounted for, recovered, and recirculated across multiple lifecycles.
This shift realigns incentives. When materials are leased, there’s a built-in motivation to track their use, ensure recovery at end-of-life, and design products for disassembly and reuse. What emerges is not a linear flow from mine to landfill, but a circular loop, where metals power one generation of devices, then return to serve the next. There are already, of course, industries where leasing has or is becoming a norm such as jet engines, construction equipment and IT infrastructure (often billed as “as-a-service”).
With leading tech manufacturers and cloud providers based in Ireland, the “metals-as-a-service” approach offers an opportunity to help shape the future of sustainable innovation in Europe. It builds on existing industrial practices in other sectors and applies them to the urgent, growing challenge of material scarcity in high-tech industries.
In order for this model to be viable, metals must be efficiently and cleanly recovered from used products, manufacturing scrap, and even low-grade ores once considered uneconomical.
The good news is that this is no longer merely speculative. Emerging technologies now enable precisely this, using ambient-temperature chemical processes that can extract critical minerals like copper, gold, and cobalt from complex waste streams, without high heat, cyanide, or other toxic inputs. Some methods can recover metals up to 100 times faster than conventional techniques, expanding the economic potential of e-waste and stranded ore bodies. Urban mines such as old data centres, decommissioned EV batteries, and obsolete electronics have a become massive, underutilised resource that can underpin a new industrial strategy, as opposed to a recycling challenge.
Leasing metals establishes secure, localised loops of critical materials, enabling tech companies to reduce their exposure to geopolitical risks and trade disruptions, and enhancing their overall supply chain resilience. At the same time, recovering metals from existing products and infrastructure dramatically lowers the environmental footprint of extraction, by requiring less energy, generating fewer emissions, and avoiding further land degradation. Economically, leasing preserves the residual value of materials that would otherwise be lost, reducing long-term input costs and empowering businesses that are built on responsible resource stewardship. Crucially, this model also improves transparency in material flows and supports compliance with policy frameworks like the EU’s Green Deal and Circular Economy Action Plan.
However, realising this transition requires innovation that is supported by policy leadership and industry commitment. Regulators must go beyond waste directives to incentivise closed-loop material flows through tax benefits, procurement standards, and recovery targets. Stronger enforcement of existing laws like the Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) directive is also essential. For manufacturers, it means shifting away from extractive thinking and investing in end-of-life logistics, modular design, and collaborative platforms for shared material infrastructure.
As tensions rise over critical mineral access, and climate targets become more urgent, the time to rethink material supply chains is now. Leasing metals and embracing regenerative recovery isn’t just an environmental gesture, it’s an industrial strategy for future-proofing tech companies.
The resources we need are already circulating in our economies. So with the right policies and corporate leadership we can turn our phones, servers, and EVs into the above ground mines of the future, leasing metals to make them live forever.
See more breaking stories here.
