Continuum Powders & AM Research White Paper Argues that Circular Economics is Central to Scaling Metal AM

Pretty much everyone is aware that, over the last several decades, Western nations have continuously ceded control over manufacturing supply chains to China. It has been less widely appreciated that critical mineral supply chains have also been subject to a parallel trajectory of increasingly lost ground by the West, but the world is starting to wake up to this fact, as well.

Mainly, that’s because of China’s imposition of stricter export controls over less ubiquitous commodities like rare earths and tungsten. But China’s critical minerals dominance extends to a broad range of materials that includes metals as commonplace as aluminum. A push to reassert some control over critical minerals supply is at least part of the explanation behind the US’s growing adoption of metal additive manufac