Battery black mass and magnet swarf have been found scarce and critical materials essential to the national defense, and copper scrap is excluded
Swarf is the metal left behind when a part is machined. Black mass is what a lithium battery becomes once it has been shredded. Both are now, by presidential determination, scarce and critical materials essential to the national defense.
Presidential Determination No. 2026-19 was signed on 30 July and went on public inspection at 11.15 on Monday morning, for publication on 4 August. It is addressed to the Secretary of Commerce. It runs to three short sections and it does not name a company, a quantity, a destination or a date.
Section 3 is the operative one. Acting under section 101 of the Defense Production Act of 1950, at 50 U.S.C. 4511, the President finds that recoverable critical minerals and materials are scarce and critical materials essential to the national defense, and that the requirements of the national defense for them cannot otherwise be met without creating a significant dislocation of the normal distribution of such material in the civilian market to such a degree as to create appreciable hardship.
Those are not general observations. They are the two findings the statute itself names. Section 101(b) says the powers granted in that section "shall not be used to control the general distribution of any material in the civilian market" unless the President finds both, and the determination makes both, in the statute's own words.
What counts as recoverable
The definition is written wide and then cut once.
Under section 2(a), recoverable critical minerals and materials include black mass, end-of-life rare-earth permanent magnets or other goods that have fully completed the manufacturing process, swarf, and other waste and scrap containing critical minerals and materials. The single exclusion is copper scrap, which the determination says is already covered by Proclamation 10962 of 30 July 2025, Adjusting Imports of Copper Into the United States. That proclamation was signed a year to the day before this determination and published on 5 August 2025.
What counts as a critical mineral or material is then imported from three places at once: minerals as defined in Executive Order 14241 of 20 March 2025, strategic and critical materials as defined by 50 U.S.C. 98h-3, and critical materials as defined by section 7002(a)(2) of the Energy Act of 2020. To those the determination adds a fourth category with no list attached, any other mineral or material designated by the Secretary of Commerce.
What has not happened
No rule. No order. No allocation.
Section 3(b) directs the Secretary of Commerce to implement the determination by taking all appropriate action under section 101, including by issuing regulations, rules, guidance and procedures, under the delegation already made in Executive Order 13603. That is the whole of the instruction. The determination supplies the predicate the statute requires and stops there, and nothing in it says when anything else arrives.
