Federal Climate and Energy Minister Chris Bowen returned to Mint Innovation's Sydney facility to see the company’s latest technological advancements in critical minerals recovery.
Mint Innovation, known for recovering copper and gold from printed circuit boards using patented technology, is now scaling up technologies to recover silver, tin and additional volumes of palladium.
"It's great to be back and see the progress since my last visit," Minister Bowen said. "This facility is showing what local manufacturing can deliver – high quality jobs in McMahon and the critical materials we need for our clean energy future."
The ministerial visit came on the same day Australia and the United States announced a bilateral framework on critical minerals and rare earths, under which the two countries will invest more than U.S. $3 billion together for critical minerals projects. The announcement forms part of a broader $8.5 billion pipeline to secure supply chains for defense, renewable energy, and advanced manufacturing.
“The timing of this announcement underscores the strategic role technology like ours play in building secure supply chains”, says Mint CEO and Cofounder, Will Barker. “We’re recovering four critical metals from e-waste locally in Sydney that are essential to U.S. defense and manufacturing that would otherwise be shipped offshore. This framework could help us expand faster into additional critical material technologies here in Australia.”
The Sydney facility was supported by an AU$4.2 million federal Modern Manufacturing Initiative grant. A second facility is under construction in Texas, and an £8.1 million battery recycling demonstration project is underway in the UK's West Midlands with Jaguar Land Rover and research partners.
Australia generates approximately 600,000 tonnes of e-waste annually. Domestic processing capacity for recovering high-value metals like copper and gold remains limited, meaning materials essential to U.S. defense and manufacturing often lack local recovery pathways. The partnership requires processing infrastructure that can turn waste streams into strategic assets at scale. The ministerial visit reinforces the importance of local solutions like Mint's in securing domestic critical metals and accelerating the shift to more sustainable and resilient economies.
