Episode #66: Turning E-Waste Into a Sovereign Metals Supply Chain: Mint Innovation’s Biometallurgy with Matt Bedingfield
Matt Horine discusses the roughly 10 million metric tons of US e-waste generated annually, only about 15% of which is formally recycled, and how exporting it sends valuable copper, gold, and silver offshore. Guest Matt Bedingfield, global president of Mint Innovation, argues the US minerals challenge is primarily a processing and infrastructure problem, not mining, and frames e-waste as a national asset or “urban mine.” He outlines his career across metals and recycling and explains Mint’s patented biometallurgical hydrometallurgy process for recovering metals from printed circuit boards with low temperatures, lower capital cost, and traceable output. The episode highlights Mint’s March 2026 closed-loop deal with HP and plans for a first US facility in Longview, Texas, emphasizing faster, lower-permitting expansion, data destruction needs, and manufacturer actions to track end-of-life materials and supplier metal sources.
Links
- Mint Innovation
- Mint Innovation on LinkedIn
- Matt Bedingfield on LinkedIn
- Veryable Is Revitalizing U.S. Manufacturing
- Sign Up on the Veryable Platform
Timestamps
- 00:00 E-Waste Wake Up Call
- 01:35 Matt’s Metals Journey
- 04:59 E-Waste as National Asset
- 06:59 How Mint Recovers Metals
- 08:57 Scaling Beyond Smelters
- 10:56 HP Closed Loop Copper
- 12:27 Copper Shortage Reality
- 14:18 Permitting Energy and Trust
- 16:02 OEM Demand and Data Destruction
- 20:04 Partnering and Collection Network
- 21:22 Longview Texas Plant Plans
- 22:09 Workforce and Metals Cluster
- 24:43 Power Infrastructure and Reshoring
- 26:23 One Action for Manufacturers
- 27:58 What’s Next for Mint
- 29:15 Wrap Up and Where to Follow
Episode Transcript
Matt Horine: [00:00:00] Welcome back to US Manufacturing Today, the podcast powered by Veryable, where we talk with the leaders, innovators, and change makers shaping the future of American industry, along with providing regular updates on the state of manufacturing, the changing policy landscape, and more.
Here's a number that should stop you in your tracks: the US generates roughly ten million metric tons of electronic waste every year. Old laptops, server boards, industrial equipment, and smartphones, and of that pile, we formally recycle about 15%. The rest, most of it heads offshore, and when it goes, it takes the copper, gold, silver with it, exactly the materials our manufacturers are being told to secure domestically.
Today's guest has been arguing for years, including from a seat testifying before Congress, that America's minerals problem is not a mining problem. It's a processing problem. We already have the feedstock. We just don't have the infrastructure to recover it. Matt Bedingfield is the global president of Mint Innovation.
They use a patented biometallurgical process to recover copper, gold, and other [00:01:00] critical metals from printed circuit boards at lower temperatures, lower capital cost, and with traceable, certifiable output. Their March 2026 close loop deal with HP recycled copper from old laptops back into new ones just proved the model works at commercial scale, and Mint's first US facility is being built right now in Longview, Texas.
We're excited to have Matt here on the show with us today. Matt, welcome to US Manufacturing today.
Matt Bedingfield: Matt, I appreciate you having me. Luckily, there's on-only two of us, so maybe the Matts won't get confusing here.
Matt Horine: This is a first. I think this is the first time we've had another Matt on the show, so this is, this is new unexplored territory, but I'm sure it'll be great.
We got a chance to meet prior to recording this show, and you have a really interesting background. You've had a career that ran through conventional metals before landing at Mint. Walk us through that journey from your hometown in Alabama to a company built on biometallurgy coming out of New Zealand.
It's a pretty fascinating career path.
Matt Bedingfield: Yeah, sure. I guess like most people, it's not exactly linear, but I grew up in Athens, Alabama, a town about twenty miles [00:02:00] south of the Tennessee border. I ended up going to Ole Miss for undergrad. That was my version of getting out. At that point, I think I'd been to about three states by that point.
After that, went and got my law degree and MBA from Alabama, not because I was overly ambitious or anything, just didn't know what to do, so staying in school seemed the thing to do. More SEC football seasons. After that, started my career at FedEx in finance, and then my wife is from New Orleans, and we were attending a friend's wedding down there, and it was a open bar with an understaffed bar, so the line was quite long.
And I chatted up the guy beside me while we were waiting, and he happened to be a recruiter for a metals company in Atlanta called Novelis, and that was the first job that I got. So that's how I got into metals. It was very strategic decision So I spent five years at Novelis, helped set their global recycling strategy.
They're now the largest aluminum recycler in the world. Employed billions of dollars in assets during that period. Really lucked out on the time that I joined the metals [00:03:00] industry. After that, went to Tri Arrows Aluminum, which is a competitor and also a j- a joint venture partner for Novelis, and was chief commercial officer there for five years.
Then I went to Velan, which is the world's largest copper fabricator in the world, and built out a recycling business for them, including $120 million secondary smelter here in Kentucky. Then acquired a company in St. Louis that export or deals with every recycled metal stream that you can, including e-waste.
So that's where I got exposed to e-waste specifically, and we were selling metals to smelters. I would travel over to these smelters in Korea and Japan, understand their process, how we got paid, and then I very quickly figured out that I just didn't really have any options and wanted to pursue some options, so I started trying to figure out how we build this in the US.
Worked with the DOE under President Biden and secured a two hundred and seventy million dollar matching grant to build a fully integrated copper smelter here in Kentucky. Ultimately, that ended up not panning out for one reason or another, but it didn't change my mind about [00:04:00] this being the right time and place to solve the problem.
So now I'm with Mint, and Mint does the same thing except with hydrometallurgy. And hydrometallurgy has never been affected at printed circuit boards from electronic waste, and it's for one reason. It's never been very effective at getting the gold out, and the gold is less than point one percent of the volume, but it's over eighty percent of the value.
So if you don't get that very effectively, you're done. And our founder, Will Barker, created a technology where you employ biology to actually create a magnet-type effect for the gold, and we're able to pull that out. So that enables us to build a plant in fifteen months for around forty million. So we're looking forward to moving that to the US now, and I'm raising money to do so.
Matt Horine: It's an exciting prospect, and one... It's an industry that seems overly complex because you talk about that yield coming out of there, the value coming out of the yield from e-waste or anything else, and the capability to do it onshore, which we'll talk more about here later in the show and the reindustrialization effort.
But [00:05:00] framing that, in your testimony, you, before the House Energy and Commerce subcommittee, you phrased it really well and framed it that e-waste should be treated as a national asset and not necessarily a disposal problem, which has been the name, right? What was the argument behind that response and what was...
or behi-behind that testimony, what was the response you got from, from members of Congress?
Matt Bedingfield: First of all, you're right. It is a pretty complex problem, and I guess what really struck me when I was there was the number of issues that the members have to hear on a regular basis and the depth that they have to go into to research to understand each one of them.
So I definitely don't envy them on that front. But everyone there was extremely supportive. They're all trying to understand from their specific, from their specific areas exactly how they can support, what they should support, what would their constituency want them to support. They were very engaging from that perspective.
When you talk about a national asset, think about e-waste not as a waste stream but as an urban mine. About twenty percent of the volume there is copper for, [00:06:00] from printed circuit boards. You also have aluminum. You've got steel. You've got gold, copper, silver, tin, and palladium. So all these metals are the very things that we're short on So what we're trying to do effectively is create a sovereign supply chain.
You're gonna need mines and refining for those mines. You're gonna need smelters, but you also need what we do, and you need the companies that are doing things like chromatography to get the rare earths out. So this is gonna be a combined approach to do this. But with what we do right now, we are importing copper, we are importing all of these metal units.
We're using them, and then when they come back in the waste stream, we're exporting them again, only to turn around and import again and likely pay tariffs on it. So why not just keep it here, import it once and only once, and make it a national asset?
Matt Horine: Well said. I think there's-- the tariff environment has reframed the way a lot of people think about how they conduct their business, primarily with exporting and then reimporting finished goods or raw materials either way.
Bringing it all back home and having that vertical integration is pretty critical. That [00:07:00] opens us up specifically to what Mint does and what kinda sets them apart. Can you walk us through the Mint process in plain terms for our audience? How does a pile of those printed circuit boards or things that people don't necessarily think about in terms of the asset that it is, how does it get into a new product or into something like HP that we talked about here at the opening?
Matt Bedingfield: Sure. So out of all that waste that you talked about before, it's very diverse. So you've got everything from vacuum cleaners to server racks that are considered e-waste. You're obviously gonna deal with those very differently. The content, the value of them are very different. So you have to try to segregate based on the grade that you have, and then you need to dismantle them.
And some people do that manually, some people throw in a shredder. And once you shred these things down, then you use different sorting technology to try to segregate them. The specific part of this that we're looking for are the printed circuit boards out of it, so the green boards. That's a very complex material in and of itself.
You have A lot of [00:08:00] different metals in there. The main ones we recover are the copper, silver, tin, gold, and palladium. So when you shred those things down, you have to get them small enough so that you can separate the metals, and then you can sort them any number of ways. You can sort via density, you can sort via optical, but your goal is to try to remove as much of that plastic content that is the green board, because that's not your value.
So you try to concentrate as much metal as you possibly can. Then using chemistry, you dissolve that. The biology that I mentioned, when you dissolve gold, the surface will lose an elec- will lose electrons, and gold is very much trying to get back to solid state. So with biological material, you have an excess amount of electrons on the surface, so when you drop it in, you effectively create a magnet that gives you the mass to drop that out of the solution.
So you get the gold, then you electrowin your copper, precipitate out the tin and the silver. And then on the back end, we have metal that's reusable by industry so that it stays right here in country.
Matt Horine: Yeah, it's, it sounds a lot more, a lot less complex [00:09:00] than it probably is, and I think one of the things that we've noticed in a few of our conversations is some of the capital intensive environments that are required for full scale reindustrialization.
But something unique about Mint is that it takes much less amount of time, I believe roughly 15 months, and much less capital to build something like you're doing in Longview or elsewhere than a traditional smelter, which is a billion to multi-billion dollar investment for the traditional smelter. And that's probably why we haven't seen too many of them since at least the '80s and '90s.
What does that difference mean for the reindustrialization math and the potential to scale it?
Matt Bedingfield: I think I said it a little earlier. I don't think of us as competing necessarily with the smelters. I think it's a, this is an and solution. There's a cou- a couple smelters in the US, or one that's built, one that's coming, and we're supportive of that, but they're gonna take a decade to build.
They're gonna take a significant amount of capital, and the real difference in what they have to do is the infrastructure that they have to put in. There's [00:10:00] a lot of energy that goes into that. With the way that Mint's process is designed, we look like a microbrewery on steroids. It's a bunch of tanks, pipes, vats, pumps.
We drop into existing warehouse space. We don't need our own substation, so we can plug into the energy grid, and we can plug into an ex-existing urban infrastructure. And we're also not continental in scale, so every plant's gonna be around four thousand tons of material. So we can build multiple plants where the waste is generated, and we don't have to rely on taking up the entire market.
So I think that's a big difference. But what it does I think to the re-industrialization is it gives us a way to start chipping away at the problem much sooner. So we can't wait. I've heard people say we're not gonna recycle our way out of this. That's true. We're also not gonna mine our way out of this.
We need both. So we need to start doing everything that we can as quickly as we can.
Matt Horine: Yeah. It's, I think, a pretty critical dual part approach there. I brought up the HP closed loop deal in the intro, [00:11:00] which was a, a... got a lot of coverage from Fast Company Resource Recycling. What does that certified closed loop process actually mean, and what makes it so unique, and why can traditional smelting not offer close to the same thing?
Just for the benefit of our audience.
Matt Bedingfield: When you're looking at a smelter, they have massive furnaces, so they need to keep those furnaces full, and they're gonna take a plethora of different materials. So they'll take copper slab, which is a byproduct of copper production. They're gonna take copper scrap.
They can take some printed circuit boards, maybe catalytic converters, things of that nature, and then all that goes in the bath together. So when you do that, you lose traceability of what metal units actually went into it. So what HP has decided as their metric is they wanna take the copper from HP end-of-life products and take their copper and put it back into new products.
So we have a discrete continuous process, which means we're gonna have multiple batches going through our plant at any given time, but there's always a [00:12:00] break between them. So if I can collect four tons of HP end-of-life printed circuit boards, I can identify the metal that comes out the back end, so they can 100% certify that is HP metal, it's closed loop, and it's going from their old laptop into their new laptop, and that's what they've got in their new flagship EliteBook now.
I think the one that they announced at Consumer Electronics Show this year, that's all mint copper.
Matt Horine: Wow, that's, it's a pretty big process change for them and a pretty exciting one to announce at CES. But you mentioned copper, and I think we talked about there might be something of a pretty significant US shortfall overall in, in the material.
I don't know if most manufacturers connect that number to the pile of servers, server racks, laptops in their facility's back room. What exactly is the shortfall, and how does a manufacturer who's maybe looking at this today in their facility, where do they see that in their facility?
Matt Bedingfield: Today, there's roughly a million ton shortfall in the US, and I say that because we export a million tons of copper scrap.
We turn around and import a million tons of refined copper. That's only gonna [00:13:00] grow. By 2035, projections are anywhere from six to 10 million tons of global shortage, and that's counting all mining projects that are coming on. So when you think about what that means, copper is the key to data centers. It's the key to energy transition, EVs.
It goes into all of these things. One data center can be as much as 50 to 200,000 tons of copper demand by itself So that's significant. So when you think about e-waste, you're gonna have copper in all the wires, you're gonna have 20% copper in your printed circuit boards, and that 10 million ton number you mentioned, it's only growing.
We see numbers anywhere from 8 to 14% a year just based on electronics proliferation in our lives. So that number's growing. So keeping that here and making sure we're recycling it, making sure we start to address that 15% recycle rate that you talked about, which is shameful, that we need to drive home because we're taking these materials that are necessary for the improvements that we're trying to make s- to society, and we're not making the best use of them.
Matt Horine: Yeah. It's something that you don't see as the impact as a [00:14:00] consumer. If I sit here as a consumer, look at all my devices, look at all the waste that we can array through the upgrades of the phone, and you just kinda send it back and don't worry about where it goes to, it's only increasing. I don't know how many devices are probably in your household at this point, but they seem to keep growing in mine.
I've got a four-year-old, so, you know, it, it's like something new every day. One of the things that have, uh, also been a recurring theme on our show is the The regulatory environment, permitting, the, for any kind of manufacturer, whatever anybody is up to, we've heard people talk about permitting, power structure, you addressed that already.
The long arc of this is domestic smelters, they largely went offshore because of the increased EPA regulatory burden. In each state, there's also an additional layer of regulation. Specifically, how does Mint's process change the permitting structure and the energy picture, and what does that mean for the timeline?
Because I think that's the real thing I wanna drive at with our audience, is that this is really compacting the permitting timelines and the processing timelines and all of those things for a more digital age that we've been in for [00:15:00] some time now.
Matt Bedingfield: Yeah, for permitting, we don't really have any air emissions, so everything's done at room temperature in our facilities.
The only byproduct that we end up not selling is a gray water, and even in Sydney, we're permitted for that to go down the drain. There are no hazardous materials, so we take care of all that. So permitting really isn't an issue for us, and as I mentioned before, from an energy perspective, we don't even need a substation.
We plug directly into the grid. It's just not a very energy intensive process. Then I guess lastly, going back to what you said about how many devices we've got, I'm in the industry, I said 15% is shameful. It is. I've probably got 10 iPads and iPhones sitting in my house right now because it's not simple to know where to take these things, and the sensitive information we all have on our devices, I think rightly makes us a little bit apprehensive.
Building this infrastructure and building the trust and making sure people know that their data is secure and safe when they recycle, I think s- it's probably on us.
Matt Horine: That's definitely it. I think people are becoming more aware of this as their personal device count probably increases, but from an organizational [00:16:00] perspective too, it's something that is pretty significant.
You're in probably conversations every day with other OEMs and government entities. What's the appetite kind of look like for this from the commercial side? Or what types of... Are manufacturers becoming more invested in this process or are people coming to companies like Mint to help them with this problem on being a feedstock partner or what's the market shaping up to look like or any insights there?
Matt Bedingfield: Absolutely. HP is the first example, and their leadership in this is much appreciated by us. So we talked to the other big guys out there, too, and they're all very interested. The Apples, the Googles, Amazon, AWS, they've all got their own strategies, their own way of measuring this, so they're all trying to solve the problem, and none of them are sitting on their hands while they're doing it.
But they all s- they all do it in different ways. So we're trying to meet the market where it is. So with HP, that was certifying that their metal goes back into their products. With others, they're worried about IP protection, so we've got a data destruction side of the business that [00:17:00] gets all the way down to NSA's standard.
So if it's good enough for classified materials, then they should feel quite comfortable that it's being taken care of. For others, it's IP protection, so that same data destruction protects that as well 'cause people are spending billions of dollars to create the compute that's needed to power the data centers right now.
For others, it's being able to take multi materials, so creating the collection network so that you don't cherry-pick what they want. Because to them, while it is valuable and they want to treat it in a very responsible way, it's also in their way. Their job is to make new product, and they can't have that older product sitting in the way.
It creates an unsafe work environment. So providing that service profile for OEMs is absolutely critical. I have to say, recycling needs to be the easy button. People wanna do it, but you, you've gotta make it very approachable for it.
Matt Horine: Yeah. You said something, people wanna do the recycling. I think about that even in our own lives.
We got a recycling bin at home. I know this isn't anything more complicated like e-waste and those types [00:18:00] of things, but people wanna do it. They wanna make sure it's going to the recycling facility. They actually take the time to separate their stuff and do it. The pathway to that being more accessible is a great thing.
You mentioned data destruction, the shredding to the NSA standard. Is that conversation with enterprise T customers, are they currently destroying working devices out of data anxiety? Are they trying to get new devices online faster? What's, what seems to be the driver with some of those enterprise-level customers and their conversations with MET?
Matt Bedingfield: Data center piece is everyone's trying to keep up. And the way technology moves right now, tech... I think IT assets in general are every five to six years you see a refresh. With data centers, you're seeing two to three years, and in some cases even faster. And that's just them trying to keep up with the technology because a data center that was built five years ago, there's no way they can compete from an efficiency perspective, from a compute perspective, from any of that today.
So they need to constantly be upgrading. Now, depending on what they have, they may wanna resell that. It's highest value, it's also highest [00:19:00] use, but they have to be very comfortable that the data was wiped They also need to be very comfortable that the IP is not gonna give anyone an unfair advantage for things that they paid for.
So that's another thing that could make them possibly wanna destroy it right there. And then when it's obsolete, it's just obsolete. But they need someone to help give that white glove service. So that's what we're working to build. The government's another party that's very interested in that. Some of the assets that come out of our military, for instance, they're very sensitive.
We need to ta- need to make sure that they're handled with the utmost care. But even more than that, the government has an extreme vested interest in keeping those metals here. So that sovereign supply chain story really resonates with that group.
Matt Horine: Yeah. I think sovereignty is the big theme overall with the conversation over the past couple years in manufacturing in general.
It started out as this long arc supply chain story about the Amazon level expectations of customer timeframe deliveries for toilet paper during the pandemic, if you remember. And wait a minute, where do we actually make [00:20:00] stuff? Not how come the Costco shelf doesn't have the product that I'm looking for?
It's a really good shift in the mentality to frame it under the sovereignty banner because I think the last couple years have exposed that quite well in a lot of respects For manufacturers in our audience thinking about their own end of life equipment, what is the pathway to becoming a partner with you look like?
Is it something that you do discovery with, or your teams work with them, or how does that look at kind of the operational level?
Matt Bedingfield: Where we are in the process right now, we'd love to start having conversations with people. We don't have the footprint yet. Like I said, I'm raising to build it out here. Our first for kind of plant's in Sydney, Australia, so it's a little bit far away for probably most of the listeners.
Trust me, I was there last week, and I can still feel it. But we are building. Right now there are about 900 IT asset disposition companies that collect these assets, so if you're not recycling them today, I would encourage you to look those up and reach out to a local one. And then those are the groups that we're gonna partner with as well to give them a home [00:21:00] that keeps the, keeps the material domestic here.
And then as we come in, then we'll be happy to deal directly.
Matt Horine: No, that's a really great, building out that network and starting that because a lot of folks, you probably see it more than I- often than I do, they sit on those assets for a long time, they're taking up spaces in storage rooms, and they're actually critical and sovereign materials, which is a really great way to frame it.
It's not just something that you have problem to be taken care of and you're hanging on to old devices. Let's talk about that expansion here in the US and a little bit of the plans that you have for your first plant in Longview, Texas. The... H- what does the timeframe look like? Where are you guys at in the build, and how's the process going so far?
Matt Bedingfield: Yeah, so we have a site already selected and leased, so we have possession of the building. We're looking at site work right now to get it ready to be built in. Obviously, a big part of that critical path is closing the raise. So right now, that's where we are. People ask me how long it'll take, and I say, "N plus 15 to 18."
So from the day the money comes in the door, then shovels go in the dirt, and we're ready to go. Plan's been designed, equipment's been selected, so we're really confident [00:22:00] about the process and excited to do it here.
Matt Horine: Yeah, that is an exciting prospect, and Longview is a great place for manufacturing. We work with a lot of manufacturers and know the area pretty well.
You've got a bit of a workforce development background as well we didn't touch on in the opening with MI2 and the metals cluster in Kentucky, which we can get into a little bit of that as well, but the facilities you're building are near population centers is the plan. What does workforce picture look like for a mint facility, and what's the talent strategy around bringing more people into manufacturing in those types of facilities?
Matt Bedingfield: Yeah, I guess I'll touch on Longview specifically first. We're gonna look at about 35 people for that plant. Longview has a big chemical industry presence, so what we found there is that the trade schools, the high schools, the colleges, they all have programs that lend itself to creating good, diligent workers in that space And I always say that you can take a bad team with the best equipment on earth and you're gonna lose, and you can give me very mediocre equipment with a great team and we'll [00:23:00] dominate.
So I think it's all about workforce. MI2, the group you mentioned, I was the founding board chair for that. It's the first metal cluster in the country. And what we basically noticed was I could build a $100 million plant and employ 75 people, and that's really neat. It's great. The economy loves it, but university presidents are not gonna sit up and ask me what programs they need to put in place to make sure that we have the talent pipeline that we need.
In Kentucky, we have a plethora of metal companies, some of the biggest guys, Nucor, Novelis, Kobe, and we brought all those companies together, and together we represented about 38,000 jobs in the state And that 75 that, that I needed to hire when I was at Velan turned into 5,000 when we looked out over metals for the next few years.
That got people's attention. So we were able to work with the governor to sit down with him every few months, and got university presidents on our board so that they would listen to the needs that we had. Doing that to try [00:24:00] to create the magnet for manufacturing, 'cause it is a great career, and we do need to draw more people into it.
Matt Horine: Yeah. The-- It's something that has become more and more apparent. There's a lot of talk about that people will umbrella term it with skilled trades or those types of things, but the pairing with this reindustrialization moment that we're seeing in the country is manufacturing has always been the career field.
And a lot of times what happened over the past couple of decades in the era of globalization was labor arbitrage or finding the cheapest route to, to attack it. And we're finding out, based again on what your great point on the sovereignty question, is that not only is it a critical metal or material or process, it's also the second and third order effects around towns that set up and build for manufacturing and that drives the economy in the local regions.
But one other point, you made an interesting observation about former... This may have been in our t- our talk beforehand, but about former smelter sites being repurposed as data center sites because of their existing substation capacity, some of the power questions there. What does it tell you about the infrastructure gap?
Do you see [00:25:00] a pretty big infrastructure gap? I know you guys are-- you're able to plug right in, but do you see or foresee any other issues on that front?
Matt Bedingfield: Power is gonna be a big one. We need more of it. And I heard someone in DC recently say power demand's a good thing. We just need to have the right kind of it.
So it's not a bad thing, but I think we need to think about it a little bit more differently. Reusing some of that dormant capacity, I think, is a great way to do that, getting more creative in how we create more of it. Now, when we build more power infrastructure, guess what? It's a lot more copper demand as well.
So you're right back to critical minerals, which we need the workforce to do. Reshoring as a whole, I'm extremely supportive of, very excited about it, and I think I'm really excited that the current administration has finally seen that we can reshore all day long. But if we don't have the raw materials to feed the plants that we're bringing back here, we've done nothing from a supply chain security perspective.
Because most of these raw materials that we're importing get created or manufactured in more [00:26:00] geopolitically risky areas, and we all see how that's going today. So we need to start at the beginning And bring it, make sure that we have the infrastructure on the front end for the raw materials.
Matt Horine: All right.
That's-- I think people are uncovering multiple different layers to this process. It's not just a jobs announcement and a facility groundbreaking opening that, and it's done. There's a lot of second and third order effects that go into that. Last big question for you, and we ask this of every guest. For the manufacturer listening right now who wants to do something about the critical miner- minerals gap or the domestic processing opportunity or become potentially a partner with you or within your network, what's the one action you'd recommend they take over the next thirty, sixty, ninety days to maybe think differently about what they're doing?
Because people are looking for a way to solve this and to get involved or to be part of the process. But as you're talking to a manufacturer today, what's something different that they should be doing?
Matt Bedingfield: I guess there's two sides on each end of their supply chain. One, on the back end, make sure you know where your materials are going, what's being [00:27:00] done with them.
If you can keep them here and close a loop with your customers, start to sell based on that because they enjoy saying that. They enjoy being able to market that. They enjoy knowing that it's a circular economy here. The second thing is understand where your suppliers are getting their metal units from That's gonna impact your vulnerability to tariffs, and ultimately supply, because when the extreme shortage does come as we get into the 2030s, someone's not gonna have a chair when the music stops.
So we need to take control of our supply chain and understand that is the lifeblood of our business.
Matt Horine: That's really sound and good advice for people because that date has been looming out there for a lot of reasons for a long time, and I think the big question, we're coming out of America 250 this week, is what does the An- American century look like?
And so if when people aren't thinking about this in terms of securing critical minerals or doing things the right way for the state sovereignty, then, then it becomes a lot more complex as those five-year and 10-year increments roll on. What's next for Mint? I know you [00:28:00] mentioned that you're doing the raise, the facility's coming up.
What are the next big things for you and the team, and where can our audience go to find out more about that?
Matt Bedingfield: Go to our website. We keep everything updated there. We're also on LinkedIn giving announcements on a regular basis. We're full speed ahead. We just had an important announcement last week. I think four-star General Robert Neller from the US Marine Corps joined us as a strategic advisor, so he's helping guide us through that.
You mentioned president earlier. This week I'm actually transitioning to CEO, with our founder, Barker, stepping aside, staying involved as strategic advisor as well as executive director, so we're moving forward down that path. So very excited to, to lead Mint going forward. And then we'll be out talking to investors over the next couple months, and I'm, I'll very likely be on the road a lot, so.
Matt Horine: Fantastic news. It sounds like things are really taking shape, the right type of people are joining the organization, and congratulations to you on that big step. It's a really exciting prospect to have this type of industry back in the US. It's been a fantastic conversation. [00:29:00] Thank you to you and your team and the work that you're putting in.
It's the kind of exciting infrastructure building and reindustrialization meets the real road type of talk we like to have. We appreciate you coming on the show today.
Matt Bedingfield: No, thank you, Matt. I very much appreciate it.
Matt Horine: To stay ahead of the curve and to help plan your strategy, please check out our website at variableapps.com and under the resources section titled Trump 2.0, where you can see the framework around upcoming policies from the administration and how they will impact you as a manufacturer.
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