Roshan Rao

The U.S. Department of Energy recently made headlines with a massive announcement detailing over $500 million in funding to strengthen domestic processing of critical minerals and battery manufacturing. Combined with an additional forty-five million dollars in specialized initiatives, the federal government is making a historic push to reduce reliance on foreign monopolies for the raw materials that power our digital world. While this large-scale economic package may seem distant from...

Recently, ByteBack was invited by Morgan Forney from the City of Town and Country to participate in their annual paper and electronics recycling event. Together, the event enabled hundreds of families in the Town and Country region to responsibly recycle their e-waste and unused paper. In total, an impressive 16,000 pounds of material was collected and recycled. As a participant and observer, it was one of the smoothest-run events I have seen. I was genuinely impressed not only by the city’s...

One of Supra's cartridges used to recover critical minerals As part of my ongoing research on building a more resilient rare earth mineral supply chain, I came across a UT Austin startup, Supra Elemental Recovery, that is helping address the problem by recovering valuable materials from e-waste. This company is building a system that can recover critical minerals from mine tailings, industrial byproducts, and e-waste. What makes their approach different is the technology itself. Supra uses a...