Let me start with a tree.
Not a metaphor. An actual tree. A cherry tree in spring.
It makes thousands of blossoms. Every one of them falls. The ground turns pink and white. And here is what I want you to notice: nobody has ever called a cherry tree wasteful. Nobody has written a regulation to manage the blossom stream. Nobody has proposed a landfill for petals.
If you have ever stood beside the Tidal Basin in Washington, D.C. in early April, you have seen this for yourself. In 1912, the city of Tokyo sent 3,020 cherry trees to Washington as a gift of friendship. More than a century later, people travel from around the world every spring to watch those trees let go of their blossoms. We built a festival around the very thing our industries would have labeled a loss.
Why? Because the blossoms are not waste. They are food.
They feed the soil, the soil feeds the roots, the roots feed the tree, and the tree makes more blossoms. The system is designed so that what falls becomes what grows.
Nature is not merely a collection of resources for humans to use. It is a living world of extraordinary complexity in which humanity is only one participant.
Hold that picture. Because I’m about to show you its opposite.
The thing in your pocket
Take out your phone.
Inside it is a flat pouch about the size of a deck of cards, weighing less than an ounce and a half. It is built from five elements, and each one has made a long journey to get there.
Cobalt holds the structure of the battery steady. Most of the world’s cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where some is mined industrially and some is dug by hand, which is where the child-labor stories come from. Most of it is then refined in China.
Lithium is the traveler. It shuttles back and forth inside the cell every time you charge and use your phone. It comes from salt flats in Chile and Argentina, where brine is left to evaporate in ponds for months, and from hard rock mined in Australia.
Nickel and manganese are in many phones in small amounts and in electric cars in enormous ones. A single EV pack holds tens of kilograms of nickel. Graphite forms the other half of the cell, and the processing that turns it into battery grade has largely moved overseas.
A few grams of metal from central Africa. A fraction of a gram from a salt flat. Nickel from islands on the other side of the world. All of it purified with energy, water, and chemicals, assembled with astonishing precision, and sealed in a pouch you carry against your leg.
There are no villains in this story.
But there is no one holding the whole of it either.
And here is where the story turns.
In a few years, that battery will stop holding a charge. And in most cases we will do one of three things: put it in a drawer, throw it in the trash, or send it into a recycling stream that shreds it into a dark powder and ships it, very often, to the other side of the world.
That powder has a name. It’s called black mass.
A powder worth two hours
I recently spent two hours in front of a room of engineers, designers, and policymakers talking about this dust. Some of them probably felt that was an unreasonable amount of time to spend on powder. But I believe black mass is one of the most important design opportunities in the American economy, because it sits at the exact point where national security, public health, economic strength, and ecological repair can all be solved by the same act of intelligence.
Here is the idea that changed how I see it.
The metals in a battery do not wear out.
When a battery stops holding a charge, the atoms of cobalt have not aged. The nickel is exactly as good as the day it was dug up. What has degraded is the arrangement: the crystal structure has been strained by thousands of charging cycles. The structure is tired. The elements are immortal.
So when we throw a battery away, we are taking a material that is effectively eternal, that cost us a fortune to extract, and that is geopolitically contested, and we are treating it like a banana peel.
It may be the most expensive habit of carelessness in the modern economy. And it is also one of the most fixable.
The mindset trap: “less bad”
For thirty years, many of the best people in the environmental movement have said the answer is to be less bad.
Reduce. Minimize. Use less. Waste less.
I understand the impulse. I respect the work. But imagine I told you I was driving you somewhere, and I proudly said I had reduced the number of times the car would hit a wall. Would you get in?
Being less bad is not being good It is still heading toward the wall. It just gets there more slowly. A slower collision is still a collision.
The shift I want to offer is this: stop asking how do we make the damage smaller? and start asking how do we make the thing good?
A battery that is good for the miner. Good for the river.
Good for the factory worker. Good for the community that hosts the recycling plant. Good for the child who will inherit the metals, and the child after that.
That is a different design brief. And a different brief produces a different world.
Waste equals food
In nature there are two kinds of material. Biological nutrients, like leaves and blossoms, safely return to the soil. But humans invented something nature never made: metals, plastics, and synthetic materials that can’t safely return to the soil. We called them waste because we had nowhere to put them.
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But they are not waste either. They are technical nutrients, meant to travel a different loop: made into a product, used, returned, recovered at the same quality or better, and made into a product again. For a thousand years, if need be.
Waste equals food. Those three words are the whole philosophy.
Three ways to get the metals back
The way we recover the metals from black mass is where intention shows up.
Melt it. Furnaces separate the metals at high temperature. It is robust and tolerates messy material, but it burns off the graphite, often loses the lithium, and uses enormous amounts of energy. It’s a sledgehammer.
Dissolve it. Acid baths pull each metal out in turn as battery-grade chemicals. This can recover lithium and produce very pure materials, but a badly designed plant is a pollution source. A well-designed one comes close to a closed loop.
Restore it. This is the one that excites me most. Direct recycling cleans the cathode crystal itself, re-lithiates it, and puts it back to work. You do not melt the sculpture to make a new sculpture. You restore the sculpture. It works best with clean, sorted material, like scrap from battery factories, and it keeps the most value.
The future isn’t one process. It’s the right process for the right material.
This is the difference between recycling and upcycling. Much of what we call recycling is really downcycling: a plastic bottle becomes a park bench, then something that can’t be recycled again. Upcycling means the second life is as valuable as the first, and the third as valuable as the second. The loop holds.
But one more thing matters here: a closed loop that poisons its neighbors is not a closed loop. It’s a leak with good public relations. The real test of upcycling isn’t whether the metal came back. It’s whether everything that touched the metal is better off.
Where America stands
Now the honest part.
For decades the United States let the middle of the battery chain move overseas. We kept the digging and the selling, and sent away the refining. A pile of ore is not a battery. It’s a promise. It becomes a battery only when someone refines it into the exact chemicals a cell maker can use.
In 2025, the U.S. exported roughly 100,000 metric tons of black mass, up nearly 50 percent from the year before. We took the powder holding the metals of our own batteries and put it on ships, to be turned into valuable chemicals in someone else’s factory, and then, very likely, bought some of them back.
That isn’t a supply chain. It’s a revolving door with a toll booth on it.
This August, the Commerce Department put export controls on black mass, effective August 27 for one year. Whether that becomes a bridge or a wall depends on one question: can we refine it here? One analysis cited by the Union of Concerned Scientists estimated North American refining capacity at roughly 7,000 tons against about 65,000 tons of feedstock. We have plenty of powder and not nearly enough kitchens.
The same analysis made a point I think is exactly right: keeping the powder at home isn’t enough if nothing requires a high share of the metals to actually be recovered. A border is not a recovery rate.
There is real movement. The Department of Energy announced roughly half a billion dollars in recycling and refining grants this year, including support for a large black mass refinery planned for the Southeast. Plants are opening in Oklahoma. Canada is building its own refining. But this is a hard business, and some early leaders have struggled. It will need patience.
What would a good system look like?
I came away from all of this with a handful of design ideas.
- Design for return. At least half the recycling problem is a design problem. Packs glued together can’t be taken apart. Build batteries that come apart, with chemistries that are safe to recover.
- Give every battery a passport. A digital record of what’s inside, where it came from, and what condition it’s in. The biggest cost in recycling isn’t chemistry, it’s uncertainty.
- Make the maker responsible. When the company that sells the battery owns the end of its life, it has every reason to design for recovery. Better still, sell the service of energy storage and keep ownership of the metal.
- Power the loop with the sun. A recycling plant should be the cleanest-powered building on its block.
- Measure everything, publicly. Recovery rates, energy, water, injuries, and emissions.
- Put safety and justice first. The people who live beside these plants should have real information and a real voice, and the work inside them should be safe.
What I’m asking you to change
I’m not asking you to feel guilty about your phone.
I’m asking you to change the question. Not how do I use less and feel bad about it? but what if everything I made were as generous as that cherry tree?
The tree isn’t saying be small. It makes far more than it needs. It isn’t trying to be less. It’s trying to be generative, and everything it makes feeds something.
That is the shift: not smallness, but generosity by design.
Human beings are not a blight on this planet. We are the only species that has ever been able to choose its relationship to the rest. For a hundred years we have chosen badly, not out of malice, but because the design brief never asked the right question. Now we get to change the brief.
So here’s a small first step. Bring your old batteries back. Don’t leave them in a drawer and don’t put them in the trash. Ask the companies you buy from where your batteries go when they die, and prefer the ones with good answers.
The next time you hold a battery, remember that it has a name. Not the one on the label. Its real name. Cobalt. Nickel. Lithium. Manganese. Carbon. These are old names, older than this country, forged in stars before the earth existed. They will be here when every device in your house is dust.
We did not make these materials. We borrowed them. And a borrowed thing has an owner, and the owner is the future, and the future would like them back.
Let’s give them back better than we found them.
Let’s build a world where the battery remembers its name, and is never lost.
Policy and capacity figures reflect reporting from August 2026 and may have changed.
