The rule that took effect on 27 August restricts four Schedule B codes. The Presidential Determination it rests on describes a category many times larger. Anyone treating recoverable critical minerals export restrictions as a battery recycling story is reading the implementation rather than the authority, and the gap between the two is the most useful thing in either document.
The mechanics of what has already been restricted are covered in our breakdown of the BIS Directive Allocation Order. This piece works through what the underlying Determination makes available, and what a procurement team can reasonably do with that information.
What the Determination Actually Covers
Presidential Determination No. 2026-19, signed on 30 July 2026 and published in the Federal Register on 4 August, defines its subject in a single sentence at 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.
Four categories, and only the first has been implemented.
End-of-life rare earth permanent magnets are named explicitly. So is the broader phrase covering other goods that have fully completed the manufacturing process, which extends past magnets to finished articles generally once they reach end of life. Swarf, the machining and grinding residue generated when metal parts are cut, is its own category and is generated continuously by manufacturing rather than arriving on a retirement curve.
Then the residual clause: other waste and scrap containing critical minerals and materials. That phrase is doing the heaviest lifting in the document, and its reach depends entirely on what counts as a critical mineral or material.
How Far "Critical Minerals and Materials" Reaches
Section 2(b) of the Determination answers that by incorporating three existing definitions and then adding an open one.
It covers minerals as defined in Executive Order 14241 of March 2025. It covers strategic and critical materials as defined by 50 U.S.C. 98h-3. It covers critical materials as defined by section 7002(a)(2) of the Energy Act of 2020. And, notwithstanding Executive Order 13603, it covers any other mineral or material designated by the Secretary of Commerce.
The Energy Act reference is the one with a published list attached. The USGS finalized the 2025 List of Critical Minerals on 7 November 2025, and it contains 60 mineral commodities, up from 50 on the 2022 list. Among them are aluminum, cobalt, copper, graphite, lead, lithium, manganese, nickel, silicon, tin, titanium, tungsten, zinc, and fifteen rare earth elements. The USGS has also stated that the list is not permanent and will be updated at least biannually to reflect supply, demand, production concentration, and current policy priorities.
Put the residual clause together with that list and the category becomes clear. Waste and scrap containing any of 60 listed commodities is within the Determination's scope, before the Secretary of Commerce designates anything additional. That is a considerably wider universe than the four Schedule B codes currently restricted.
None of that means restrictions are coming for all of it. The Determination establishes authority. It does not exercise it, and BIS has implemented a small fraction of what it could.
The Residual Category Is Already Live
The most instructive thing BIS did is easy to miss. The order restricts two things: black mass and tungsten waste and scrap.
Black mass is named in the Determination. Tungsten waste and scrap is not. It qualifies through the residual clause, because tungsten appears on the USGS list and tungsten waste and scrap is waste and scrap containing a critical mineral.
So in the first implementation, BIS reached into the catch-all category and pulled something out. The residual clause is not decorative language sitting at the end of a definition. It is operative, and it has already been used.
That changes how the rest of the list should be read. A material does not need to be named in the Determination to be restricted. It needs to be waste or scrap, and it needs to contain something on a list that runs to 60 commodities and gets revised at least twice a year.
What the Other Three Categories Actually Contain
Describing the named categories is not the same as predicting which gets restricted, and this section does the former only.
End-of-life rare earth permanent magnets are the category with the clearest strategic profile. Fifteen rare earth elements sit on the USGS list, and the USGS identified several of them, including samarium, lutetium, terbium, dysprosium, gadolinium, and yttrium, among the commodities assessed at the highest supply risk. Magnets reaching end of life are embedded in motors, drives, hard drives, and wind turbine assemblies, which means the recoverable stream is dispersed across durable goods rather than concentrated at industrial sites.
The broader phrase covering other goods that have fully completed the manufacturing process extends beyond magnets. Read plainly, it reaches finished articles generally once they reach end of life, provided they contain critical minerals and materials. How far that extends in practice depends entirely on implementation, and nothing has implemented it.
Swarf is the category most likely to surprise the companies generating it. It is the residue produced when metal parts are machined, ground, or cut, and it arrives continuously as a byproduct of manufacturing rather than on any retirement curve. Companies generating swarf containing listed commodities are often not in the recycling business at all and may not think of their scrap stream as a regulated category. That is a characteristic worth noting regardless of whether restrictions ever arrive, because it describes where the awareness gap sits.
Black mass, the one implemented category, is described in our explainer on what black mass is and why it matters. Its treatment is the only worked example available of how the Determination gets translated into an operative rule.
What the Copper Carve-Out Shows
The Determination excludes one thing specifically. Copper scrap is outside the definition of recoverable CMMs, because it is already addressed under Proclamation 10962 of 30 July 2025 on copper imports.
That exclusion is worth noting for what it implies about drafting rather than about copper. The carve-out exists to avoid overlapping instruments, not because copper scrap was considered unimportant. Copper was added to the USGS critical minerals list in the 2025 revision.
The practical read is that a material's absence from these recoverable critical minerals export restrictions does not indicate it is outside the policy's interest. It may indicate that a different instrument already covers it, or that implementation has not reached it yet.
What the First Recoverable Critical Minerals Export Restrictions Established
Whatever gets added next, the shape of the intervention is no longer a matter of speculation. The August order established a pattern that can be described precisely.
Restriction is defined by Schedule B code rather than by material description, with a definitional qualifier attached where the code is broader than the intended target. The requirement is allocation of 100 percent of monthly sales to US persons rather than a licensing regime. Notice is short, in this case three weeks between publication and effect. Enforcement runs through CBP at the point of export. Exceptions exist on enumerated grounds but are discretionary, with the burden on the applicant. And the order carries an expiry date, with extension at the agency's discretion.
Anyone whose material could plausibly fall within the Determination's scope now knows roughly what an intervention would look like and how much time it would come with. Three weeks is not enough to restructure a supply chain. It is enough to execute a plan that already exists.
Where Refined Output Sat in the First Implementation
One feature of the August order matters more than its specific coverage, because it is the part most likely to repeat.
Every code BIS selected is a waste and scrap heading. The order reached the recoverable stream and stopped there. Refined products made from that stream were not covered, which we work through in detail in our analysis of which Schedule B codes the order actually reaches. That is consistent with the authority, which is aimed at keeping unrefined feedstock available to domestic processors, a point developed further in our analysis of why post-treatment refining became a structural advantage. Restricting the refined output would work against the objective, since the refined output is the evidence that domestic processing happened.
Whether the same logic applies to future orders is not guaranteed. It is one data point, and BIS has reserved the ability to expand. But it is the only data point that exists, and it points in a consistent direction: value added on domestic soil moves material from the restricted side of the line to the unrestricted side.
For battery recyclers, that is the durable position rather than a temporary advantage. Green Li-ion's operation at Atoka, Oklahoma converts black mass into four finished products through GREEN HYDROREJUVENATION™: precursor cathode active material, technical-grade lithium carbonate, recycled graphite, and NCM hydroxide. Under the current order, the input is covered and the outputs are not. If the pattern holds through subsequent orders, the same relationship applies to whatever is restricted next.
Graphite illustrates the point from a second direction. It appears on the USGS critical minerals list, it is named inside the black mass definition as an anode material, and it is one of the outputs Green Li-ion recovers. Under the order as written, graphite-bearing shredded scrap is covered and refined recovered graphite is not, which is the same input-output relationship applied to a single commodity. Our analysis of the recycled graphite supply chain covers why that stream matters independently of this rule.
The deployment question that follows is covered separately in our piece on what the order's expiry date does to capacity decisions.
What Procurement Teams Can Reasonably Do
None of the following requires predicting what BIS does, which nobody can do.
The first step is inventory. Any material stream that is waste or scrap and contains a commodity on the USGS list sits within the Determination's potential scope. That is a wider set than most companies have mapped, and mapping it costs little.
The second is understanding classification. The August order was scoped by Schedule B code, and the codes a company exports under determine exposure more directly than the material description does. Knowing those codes now is cheaper than establishing them under time pressure.
The third is asking where value gets added. Where a company ships an unrefined intermediate abroad for processing, that is the profile the Determination targets. Where processing already happens domestically and the exported product is refined, the profile is different, at least under the one order that exists.
The fourth is the comment record. Comments on the current temporary final rule close on 4 November 2026 under docket BIS-2026-0364. That process concerns the existing order rather than any future one, but it is the available route for putting a position in front of the agency.
Procurement teams reviewing where recoverable material can be processed domestically can begin partnership conversations with qualified recyclers such as Green Li-ion, whose output has sat outside the restricted codes under the order as written.
The Honest Summary
Presidential Determination 2026-19 defines recoverable critical minerals and materials as black mass, end-of-life rare earth magnets and other finished goods, swarf, and other waste and scrap containing critical minerals and materials, with copper scrap excluded because a separate proclamation covers it. BIS has implemented restrictions covering black mass and tungsten waste and scrap. The authority reaches considerably further than the implementation.
Tungsten is the detail worth carrying forward. It was not named in the Determination and was restricted anyway, through the residual clause, because it appears on the USGS critical minerals list. That list now runs to 60 commodities and is revised at least twice a year.
Three limits on this analysis, and they matter. Nothing here predicts what BIS restricts next, because nothing published supports a prediction, and any article claiming otherwise is speculating. The observation that refined output sat outside the first order is a single data point rather than a rule, and BIS has explicitly reserved the ability to expand. And the scope questions raised here are classification questions, which belong with a customs broker or trade counsel rather than with a supplier or an article.
What can be said with confidence is narrower and still useful. The category is wide, the residual clause is live, the intervention template is known, and the notice period in the one example available was three weeks.
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