What actually makes a mineral critical?

In our last piece, we followed black mass from the shredder to the refinery and ended on a question: Who controls the refining? The same question runs through the whole battery supply chain, from the lithium in the cathode to the graphite in the anode.

Governments have a name for the materials where that question carries real risk -critical minerals. The term now appears in industrial strategies, trade deals and investment rules, yet it's rarely explained. So what actually makes a mineral critical?

What is a critical mineral?

A critical mineral is a raw material that the economy depends on and whose supply is at significant risk of disruption. It has to meet both conditions to make the list.

The word says nothing about how rare a material is. Governments weigh two things: how much the economy depends on the material, and how risky its supply is. The UK's assessment, for example, scores supply risk on production concentration, trade concentration, by-product dependence and recycling rates.

Both conditions have to hold. In the UK's 2024 assessment, palladium dropped below the criticality threshold because its supply had become more widely spread, even though industry still relies on it.

A mineral is critical only when it is both important and at risk

Each government runs its own assessment, so the lists vary. The UK's 2024 Criticality Assessment names 34 critical minerals, the EU's Critical Raw Materials Act also lists 34, and the US list, updated in November 2025, runs to 60.

Why is the supply of battery materials so concentrated?

Battery materials score high on supply risk because production sits with very few suppliers, and the further down the chain you go, the fewer there are.

Digging a material out of the ground is only the first step. It then has to be refined into battery-grade material, and that's where supply narrows. Australia, the largest lithium producer, mined around a third of the world's lithium in 2025. Meanwhile, China refined 71% of the world's lithium and 94% of its battery-grade graphite. Cobalt shows the split most clearly: 66% is mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, while 76% is refined in China.

For batteries, the bottleneck sits mostly in processing.

Cathode material is more concentrated still. Lithium iron phosphate (LFP) now supplies over half of the global electric car battery market, and over 98% of LFP cathode material is produced in China.

Mined in several places, processed in very few.

Concentration on this scale creates a dependency, whoever the producer is. When one stage of a supply chain sits almost entirely in one place, everyone else's supply rests on decisions made there. The IEA notes that export restrictions, from cobalt quotas in the DRC to new limits on lithium and graphite exports elsewhere, have made that an immediate risk.

Which battery materials are on the list?

Four materials do most of the work in a lithium-ion battery, and all four appear on the UK, EU and US lists. Lithium carries the charge in every cell. Nickel and cobalt raise energy density in nickel-based cathodes, while LFP cathodes use neither. Graphite forms the anode.

Graphite gets the least attention, even though almost every lithium-ion battery uses a graphite-based anode, whatever its cathode chemistry. The IEA now ranks it among the materials most exposed to supply risk. We'll come back to graphite properly in a later piece.

Cathodes vary by chemistry, but the graphite anode is common to almost all of them.

Can recovered material count as supply?

Mining is the usual source of these materials. Recovery is a second one, and governments now write it into their targets. The EU aims to build enough recycling capacity by 2030 to supply 25% of its annual consumption of strategic raw materials. The UK's Vision 2035 strategy sets a target of 20% from recycling by 2035.

Where that material comes from matters. The UK's Critical Minerals Intelligence Centre found this year that end-of-life stocks won't be large enough to carry that load over the coming decade. Most batteries on the road today won't retire for years. Manufacturing scrap is already here.

That's where we've built our process. We recover active materials directly from manufacturing scrap at our facility in Bethnal Green, London, and we're the first European recycler to produce battery-grade spherical graphite from battery waste. We see the way forward as closer, reciprocal supply chains with Western partners, where material recovered in one country feeds cell production in another, and back again.

Recovery on its own doesn't settle the question we started with. If recovered material still has to travel halfway round the world to be processed, does recovering it reduce the dependency at all?

What's next

Next, we look at why where recycling happens matters as much as whether it happens at all.