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A federal lawmaker has introduced the "Intergovernmental Critical Minerals Task Force Act," seeking to diminish U.S. reliance on China for critical minerals via domestic mining, recycling and finding other trade partners. 

Officials in Malaysia and Thailand seized containers with hundreds of tons of e-scrap illegally imported from the United States earlier this month after tips from the U.S. nonprofit Basel Action Network.

Cathode ray tube devices, long the major headache material for the electronics recycling industry, continue to make up less and less of the end-of-life stream, but they're nowhere near gone completely, based on state program data and interviews with e-scrap processors.

As part of a broader initiative to increase efficiency, the U.S. secretary of defense has called for the Army to include the right to repair products in its procurement contracts, adding support to previous congressional efforts. 

A federal bill that would restrict U.S. exports of e-scrap has re-emerged, this time as HB 2998.

Electronics processors are increasingly adding solar panel recycling capacity, in some cases processing them similarly to declining streams like CRT glass and in other cases rolling out entirely new technologies, companies said in recent interviews.

Two e-scrap collectors that allegedly sent cathode ray tube glass to failed Midwest processor Recycletronics recently received demand letters from the U.S. EPA seeking compensation for more than $1.3 million in cleanup costs from Superfund remediation activities in 2022.

After a year that recorded a notable increase in e-scrap facility battery fires, the growing hazard and ways of mitigating it received ample attention at the Recycled Materials Association's annual conference in San Diego this week.

Although the emphasis on device repairability has risen in recent years, many devices are discarded because of a circuit board failure when they are quite fixable, said Kyle Wiens, CEO of repair firm iFixit.

Hawai'i added a host of new electronic devices and peripherals to its existing e-scrap law this year, also giving manufacturers more time to reach a 70% recycling and reuse target.