Dive Brief: - A new tool from e-Stewards and Bloom ESG aims to measure and track critical materials diverted from disposal. It’s an effort to help electronics recyclers, IT asset disposition companies and their corporate customers boost domestic supply chains and meet sustainability goals. - e-Stewards, a certification body for electronics recyclers and refurbishers, partnered last year with sustainability consultant Bloom ESG to build an environmental benefits calculator for electronics recyclers. The calculator originally helped measure avoided carbon emissions and other sustainability metrics, and a new expansion now also measures how recyclers and companies divert critical materials from disposal through recycling or refurbishment. - The “critical metals conserved” metric aims to help users better quantify specific recycled or reused materials such as copper, steel, aluminum, gold, silver and palladium. The tool will expand to track lithium, cobalt and other rare earth elements in coming months. Dive Insight: In the United States, efforts to boost U.S. domestic supply chains for critical minerals used in electronics, batteries and magnets has become a key economic and manufacturing priority. That’s partly because countries like China corner the market on certain minerals used to manufacture those items. In the last few months, that conversation has accelerated due to geopolitical factors such as tariffs and the war in Iran, which has strained supply chains for many industries. That has spurred calls for more investments in the electronics recycling industry, especially as organizations such as the Ellen MacArthur Foundation estimate there’s $67 billion in value locked inside “hibernating devices” such as forgotten laptops or old phones tossed into junk drawers around the world. Accurately measuring and accounting for these critical materials diverted from electronics is an important part of the equation, said Sebastian Foot, Bloom ESG’s co-founder. That’s because companies can’t know how much of the material