Tapping the Urban Mine: Incentivizing & Scaling Critical Mineral Supply Chains
- Date
- 2025-09-23
- Location
- Baker Botts, New York, NY, USA
- Host
- Circular Supply Chain Coalition
About this event
Critical minerals sit at the center of the next era of industrial growth, but getting enough supply to support manufacturing, energy systems, and economic resilience is not simply a mining problem. Some of the most important answers may already be embedded in products, infrastructure, and waste streams all around us. Tapping the Urban Mine: Incentivizing & Scaling Critical Mineral Supply Chains brings that challenge into focus with a practical, policy-aware conversation about how to unlock secondary sources of supply at scale. This is a timely discussion for anyone thinking seriously about supply security, domestic manufacturing capacity, and the real-world mechanics of circular industrial systems. Rather than treating recycling, recovery, and reuse as side topics, this event centers them as strategic levers in the broader effort to build more durable critical mineral supply chains. About the Event This in-person gathering at Baker Botts in New York is designed to explore how the "urban mine" can contribute to critical mineral availability and industrial autonomy. The event will look at the incentives, coordination challenges, and scaling pathways required to turn fragmented recovery opportunities into meaningful supply. At its core, this is a conversation about execution. Where are the bottlenecks between discarded materials and usable inputs for manufacturing? What kinds of market signals, regulations, partnerships, and investment structures are needed to make recovery economically viable and operationally reliable? Expect a discussion grounded in the intersection of critical mineral supply, manufacturing, and strategic autonomy. The framing is broad enough to bring together different perspectives, but focused enough to stay useful for people working directly on sourcing, industrial policy, advanced manufacturing, recycling systems, or supply-chain strategy. Because the event is in person, attendees should also expect the kind of dialogue that is often harder to create online: sharper questions, more candid exchanges, and room for cross-sector connections that continue beyond the formal program. What to Expect The program will center on the practical realities of incentivizing and scaling critical mineral recovery from existing urban and industrial material streams. That likely includes discussion of both upstream and downstream questions: how materials are identified and collected, and how recovered inputs can reliably feed manufacturing demand. Topics may include: How the urban mine fits into critical mineral strategy, including its role alongside primary extraction and imports Policy and regulatory considerations that can accelerate or hinder recovery, processing, and reuse Economic incentives needed to support collection, sorting, recycling, and reintroduction into supply chains Manufacturing implications, especially around quality, consistency, and integration of recovered materials Autonomy and resilience, including how secondary supply can strengthen domestic or regional industrial capacity Attendees should expect a format built around informed discussion rather than abstract theory. The most useful conversations in this space tend to move quickly from big-picture need to operational detail: what can scale, what cannot, and what has to change for recovery systems to become dependable sources of strategic material. There will also be value in the room itself. Events like this are especially useful when they convene people who rarely sit together enough: policy thinkers, supply-chain operators, manufacturers, investors, legal and regulatory advisors, and others working on adjacent pieces of the same problem. Why Attend If you work anywhere near critical minerals, circular economy systems, industrial strategy, or manufacturing, this event offers a chance to sharpen your view of a fast-developing part of the supply landscape. The "urban mine" is often discussed in principle; this event is about understanding what it takes to make it material to real supply chains. You will leave with a clearer sense of where the major leverage points are. That could mean understanding the incentive structures that matter most, the coordination gaps preventing scale, or the practical barriers that stand between recovered materials and industrial adoption. This event is also valuable because it treats critical minerals as a systems problem. It is not only about supply volume; it is about how collection, processing, manufacturing demand, policy design, and commercial viability interact. That perspective is especially important for professionals who need to make decisions across organizational boundaries rather than within a single technical silo. For many attendees, the payoff will be twofold: Insight into how recovery-based supply chains can become more credible, investable, and scalable Context for how critical mineral strategy connects to manufacturing competitiveness and strategic autonomy Connections with others working on policy, industrial operations, capital formation, and implementation Better questions to bring back to your team, whether you are evaluating risk, shaping strategy, or building new capabilities Practical Details When: Tuesday, September 23 at 5:30 PM EDT Where: In person at Baker Botts, New York, USA Because this is an in-person evening event, it is well suited to professionals who want a focused, post-work forum for serious discussion and relationship building. You can expect a setting that supports both formal conversation and informal exchange with other attendees. If this topic touches your work, it is worth coming prepared with a point of view. The strongest takeaways often come from comparing how different parts of the ecosystem define the problem: material access, economics, regulation, manufacturing readiness, and national or regional resilience. This event will be especially relevant for people looking beyond headline conversations about supply scarcity and toward the harder question of implementation. If you want to understand how critical mineral recovery can move from promising concept to scalable industrial reality, this is the right room to be in.
Who should attend
If your work touches the future of materials, manufacturing, or supply resilience, this event is built for you. - You work in **critical minerals, battery materials, metals, recycling, or resource recovery** and want a sharper view of how secondary supply can become a larger, more reliable part of the market. - You are involved in **manufacturing, procurement, or supply-chain strategy** and need to understand how recovered materials may affect sourcing, risk management, and long-term capacity planning. - You focus on **industrial policy, economic development, or strategic autonomy** and want to explore what kinds of incentives and frameworks can actually move urban mining from idea to implementation. - You are an **investor, operator, founder, or advisor** evaluating opportunities in circular industrial systems and want grounded discussion about what can scale and where the constraints are. - You work in **legal, regulatory, or government-facing roles** and want better context on the rules, permissions, and coordination issues that shape critical mineral recovery pathways. - You are simply trying to connect the dots between **waste streams, material recovery, and manufacturing competitiveness** and want to be in a room with others tackling the same challenge from different angles.