We are running out of critical metals. Regardless of whether it's us (AstroForge) or someone else, this has to happen, and it has to happen a lot sooner than we realize.
All manufacturers should have been forced already decades ago to slowly transition to designing for any product both how to make it from raw materials and how to extract all those raw materials, with only a few exceptions (e.g. the volatile non-metals, which enter biological cycles anyway), from the product at its end of life.
The transition should have been very slow, e.g. by imposing initially very low recovery efficiencies, e.g. well under 50%, but then raising slowly the mandatory efficiencies.
Nobody should have been allowed to manufacture and sell any products unless either the same company is able to completely recycle the product, or another company takes this responsibility for that product.
Such laws should have already been adopted long ago and then there would have been no risk of running out of critical metals.
In my opinion, the metal that is most critical today is indium, which is extremely rare but it is required, even if in minute quantities, in a lot of essential applications, like in all computer, TV or smartphone displays, in LED lighting, in GaN power supplies and in many others where no good substitutes exist.
I live like a pauper so this is all beyond me tbh. I can't square any solution that doesn't begin with not having billionaires.