Making Critical Mineral Recovery Bankable And Insurable: Breakfast Panel, Discussion, Networking Session
Hosted by
Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Carbon Trust, Solas Capital, Ellen MacArthur Foundation, Buckstop
Who should join us
This conversation is built for lenders and insurers, and for the institutional investors, valuation professionals, asset owners, and corporate supply chain leaders who would put these models to work and can speak to what constrains them.
What to expect
Speakers from Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment, Carbon Trust, Solas Capital, Ellen Macarthur Foundation, and Buckstop will lead the discussion.
A short keynote to set the stage, will be followed by a panel built around three focused questions on bankability, live audience questions, and blended networking at themed tables. The session operates under the Chatham House Rule.
Participants will come away with:
A clear view of how circular models for critical minerals can become bankable and insurable in practice.
Key insights on integrating residual value and end-of-life recovery into mainstream financing, risk, and portfolio frameworks for lenders, insurers, and institutional investors.
Registration is confirmed by the organizers to balance the room across our audiences and among Community of Practice members and non-members. Breakfast is provided; dietary requirements are collected at registration.
Program
The global transition to clean energy faces acute critical mineral shortages, yet billions of dollars in recoverable materials remain trapped within deployed assets and discarded as waste due to a critical "bankability gap." Because lenders and insurers cannot currently track, value, or underwrite these embedded materials, their residual value is entirely absent from balance sheets and borrowing bases. To overcome this bottleneck, this event convenes leading financial institutions, insurers, and circularity practitioners to explore practical solutions like asset residual value pricing and Metals-as-a-Service (MaaS). MaaS is a circular business model where retained ownership enables precise material tracking and generates stable, long-term cash flows. By bringing together diverse perspectives across the value chain, the panel will identify the specific term-sheet structures, risk-return profiles, and valuation methods required to transform critical mineral recovery from a financial blind spot into a fully investable and insurable asset class, drawing on live experience in structuring long-tenor, cash flow–backed private debt for circular and energy-efficiency assets.
Background
The clean energy economy sits on billions of dollars of recoverable value in the form of critical minerals locked inside deployed and retired assets. These are stockpiles of the same materials the energy transition is scrambling to secure, yet today’s economy treats them as waste and assigns them zero residual value, even as the supply chain tightens under geopolitical pressure and shifting policy.
The feedstock opportunity is not in underground mines. It is all around us.
Electrification is driving a surge in material needs: by 2040, demand for lithium is expected to grow 5x, nickel 2x, and copper and cobalt by 30% and 55%, respectively. Yet, current linear supply chains are forecasted to fall short of these increases; the IEA Global Critical Minerals Outlook predicts a 30% copper shortfall by 2035. This vulnerability in linear supply chains could trigger acute global economic shocks across the tech, automotive, and defense sectors. Currently, we recover only 22% of e-waste globally, resulting in an estimated $63 billion worth of metals being thrown away annually. Transitioning to a circular economy for e-waste can help prevent these demand shortfalls, reduce supply chain risks, and achieve better environmental outcomes for these valuable materials. Furthermore, circular business models can unlock up to $4.5 trillion in economic value globally, particularly within the $4.09 trillion mineral-reliant industries of the U.S. economy.
The steel-to-wind value chain offers the clearest test case. Deployment is well documented, asset lifetimes are relatively predictable, and a major decommissioning wave is approaching. End-of-life material flows from EU wind assets are projected to increase roughly ninefold, from about 133 kilotonnes in 2021 to around 1,200 kilotonnes by 2030, enough to meet an estimated 22% to 45% of the EU wind sector’s steel demand. Similar dynamics apply across other clean energy assets that are dense in critical minerals, including solar panels and batteries.
This value goes unclaimed because it cannot yet be measured in a defensible, bankable way. Scrap markets already show the material has worth. But asset owners, developers, lenders, and insurers cannot reliably state how much metal an asset contains, what it will be worth, or when it will become available. As a result, that value is absent from balance sheets, borrowing bases, insurance policies, and project models. Insurers cannot price recovery risk. Lenders cannot treat the material as collateral. Circular recovery struggles to clear the return threshold that capital requires.
Lenders must rethink their capital deployment processes to incorporate lifecycle circularity and close the “bankability gap” in recovering and reusing deployed materials. Capital is essential to scale the processes and local supply chains required to develop circular business models, such as Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS). MaaS fundamentally changes the nature of the transaction - instead of selling a ton of steel to build a wind tower, the provider retains title to the metal and charges for the service it provides over the asset’s lifespan. For the financial institutions involved, the appeal is familiar: a framework capable of generating long-term, stable cash flows from an entirely new asset class. For institutional lenders, the question is whether those cash flows can become sufficiently contracted, traceable, and ring-fenced to support long-term infrastructure debt, with repayment capacity assessed through familiar credit metrics such as coverage ratios, tenor matching, and security over asset-linked revenues. This event convenes insurers, lenders, thought leaders, and practitioners to explore the opportunities within embedded critical minerals and the role of circularity in financing a clean energy future.