Selling scrap metal has never been a glamorous way to earn a living. You weigh in worn-out drill bits, dull saw blades and chewed-up milling cutters, somebody pays you by the pound, and everyone gets on with their day. But since early 2025, American dealers sitting on bins of old tungsten carbide have been fielding offers that sound like prank calls. The buyers are Chinese scrap traders, and according to a Financial Times report picked up by MINING.com this week, some of them are offering up to five times the normal market rate for material that used to move as junk.
Here is what makes that genuinely weird. China is not short of tungsten in any normal sense of the word. Chinese mines pulled 67,000 of the roughly 85,000 metric tons the world produced in 2025, just under 80 percent of global output, according to USGS estimates. Beijing also restricted its own exports of the stuff back in February 2025. And its industry is still hungry enough to go shopping in the one tungsten deposit it has no quota over: America’s scrap bins.
If tungsten has never crossed your mind, you have still been relying on it. It is in the carbide tooling that machines practically every engine block and transmission case built in this country, in the ballast plates Formula 1 and NASCAR teams bolt low into their chassis, and in the armor-piercing munitions the US military has been burning through this year. It is also the newest chapter in a story AutoNotion has been tracking all year, from battery-grade graphite to the rare earth magnets inside nearly every American EV: China holds the supply, America holds the demand, and the gap keeps getting more expensive.
Five times the going rate, for what used to be junk
The FT report describes Chinese traders working long-standing US suppliers directly since early 2025 and routinely outbidding domestic recyclers for tungsten-bearing scrap. Global mine output has been sliding while aerospace, defense and tooling demand climbs, and recycled carbide is one of the few sources anyone can expand on short notice. Some American dealers told the paper they had been offered premiums as high as five times the normal market price. That is not a negotiation. That is a buyer who needs the material more than the money.
The price data backs the anecdotes up. Scrap tungsten prices have jumped 350 percent since May 2025, according to Argus figures cited in the report, which is wilder than it sounds because tungsten metal itself rose about 200 percent over the same stretch. The junk is appreciating faster than the finished product. Then there’s the benchmark: ammonium paratungstate, the intermediate used to make tungsten metal, hit $2,250 per metric ton unit by mid-March, a 557 percent climb since China’s export controls landed, per Fastmarkets data reported by Bloomberg. By late April, Reuters had APT above $3,000 on the same per-unit basis in Rotterdam, an all-time high.
BMO Capital Markets analyst George Heppel told Bloomberg in March that he had “never seen a market as tight as tungsten is right now,” with the possible exception of lithium in 2021. The difference, and it is not a small one, is that lithium had a pipeline of new mines waiting in the wings. Tungsten does not.
China has the mines, so why is it shopping in American scrapyards?
Start with Beijing’s own policy. China has spent the past few years deliberately capping how much tungsten its mines can produce through annual quotas, and the squeeze has pushed its own domestic users to hunt for material abroad. Washington raised tariffs on a range of Chinese tungsten products to 50 percent at the end of 2024, and Beijing answered in February 2025 with export controls on selected tungsten items. In December came another turn of the screw: just 15 companies will be licensed to export tungsten at all in 2026 and 2027.
So China is now the world’s leading producer, importer and consumer of tungsten concentrates all at once, and Chinese consumption and imports of the metal both climbed sharply in 2025, per the USGS. Which brings us to the scrap. Beijing bans direct imports of tungsten scrap, a restriction it grounds in environmental policy. But banning the scrap is not the same as banning the tungsten. The material can be processed abroad into forms China does allow in, and US scrap exports to recycling hubs in the Philippines, Taiwan, Vietnam and South Korea have all climbed this year, according to Project Blue data cited by the FT. The paper could not confirm whether that processed material ultimately ends up in China. Draw the map yourself.
Scrap is the closest thing America has to a tungsten mine
Here is the part that turns a commodity story into a national headache. The United States has not mined tungsten commercially since 2015, according to the USGS. Everything American industry consumes arrives as imports or comes back out of the recycling loop, and just seven US companies have the capability to convert concentrates, ammonium paratungstate or scrap into the tungsten powders, carbides and chemicals everyone downstream depends on.
And demand is not optional. Roughly 60 percent of US tungsten consumption goes into cemented carbide for cutting and wear-resistant parts, the tooling that construction, metalworking, mining and oil drilling run on. The automotive sector is the biggest single consumer of tungsten worldwide, taking 25 to 30 percent of supply according to Argus, mostly through the carbide that shapes engine blocks, gears and transmission cases. Tungsten is nearly identical in density to gold and holds the highest melting point of any metal at 6,192 degrees Fahrenheit, which is why it also ends up as ballast in race cars, counterweights in helicopters, and the business end of armor-piercing ammunition.
That last category is where the math gets ugly, because military tungsten does not recycle. A worn carbide insert can be melted down and turned into a new tool more or less indefinitely. The tungsten inside a fired round is consumed when it detonates, gone from the supply for good, a point Reuters columnist Andy Home made in March while tallying the munitions the US and Israel had expended in the air campaign against Iran. The same column reported that the Pentagon went looking for fresh supplies of 13 critical minerals, tungsten among them, one day before those strikes began.
Stack the trends and you get this: defense currently accounts for about 12 percent of a global tungsten market that Project Blue pegged at roughly 129,000 metric tons in 2025, and it is headed toward 15 percent by 2027 or 2028 as stockpiles get rebuilt. Argus senior analyst Cristina Belda says defense demand is growing about 8 percent a year and could overtake automotive as tungsten’s largest consumer by the mid-2030s. The two biggest buyers of this metal are the people who build your car and the people who build missiles, and only one of those groups ever gives the material back.
The fixes are real, and none of them are fast
Supply is responding, just not at American speed. Almonty Industries began mining at its Sangdong project in South Korea in March, one of the few significant tungsten operations outside China, with a second phase due in 2027. Bloomberg reported that almost half of the Korean mine’s output is already earmarked for a Pennsylvania facility that feeds munitions production, and that US officials contacted the company earlier this year asking about immediate availability. Kazakhstan’s Boguty deposit came online as well, and last October Washington and Astana announced a joint venture to develop Kazakh tungsten resources, with the FT reporting that the US government has weighed up to $1.6 billion in support for a planned mine in the country.
On this side of the world, several North American projects picked up Defense Production Act Title III awards, including efforts in Nevada and, across the border, in New Brunswick and Yukon. None of it changes the near-term picture, because Reuters notes there is still no established timeline for commercial tungsten mining to restart on US ground. It is the same playbook Washington is running on magnets, where a $1.2 billion rare earth magnet plant in South Carolina just got federal backing and still won’t ship product until 2028. Money moves fast. Mines do not.
Until one of those projects actually pours concentrate, America’s tungsten supply is whatever arrives by boat plus whatever comes out of the recycling stream, and Beijing’s buyers have now demonstrated exactly what that second category is worth to them. So if there is a coffee can of dead carbide bits sitting on a shelf in your garage, maybe don’t toss it. That is not junk anymore. It is a strategic asset with a bidding war attached.
