What Metal Chain Maps
Metal Chain maps the major stages between extraction and end use for a metal: where it's mined, where it's processed or refined, what products and industries consume it, and how much of annual supply comes from recycling rather than new mining. Every stage shown is backed by a real, cited figure from a named publisher — not an estimate invented to complete the picture. Where reliable data doesn't exist for a stage, this site shows that plainly rather than guessing.
The Stages
Mining / Extraction
Processing / Refining
Manufacturing / End Use
Secondary Supply (Recycling)
Not every metal has all four stages populated yet — Phase 1 covers Copper, Gold and Lithium in full; every other metal's page shows what's genuinely available (its existing metal profile and reserves data) with the detailed chain marked "currently being developed" rather than filled in with placeholder figures.
Concentration, Not a Risk Score
Each stage's headline percentage is a real geographic (or, for the Manufacturing/End Use and Recycling stages, sector or supply-share) concentration figure — for example, the single largest producing country's share of world mine production. This site converts that percentage into a plain High/Moderate/Low band (50%+, 25-49%, under 25%) purely as a readability aid. It is a concentration proxy, not a separately modeled risk score built from inputs like capacity utilization, geopolitical exposure or inventory levels — this site does not have a reliable dataset for those yet, and would rather show a plain, real number than a composite score with invented inputs.
How the "Current Bottleneck" Is Determined
The bottleneck shown at the top of each chain page is a direct comparison of two real numbers already on the page: the top country's share of mine/extraction production, and the top country's share of processing/refining capacity. Whichever is higher is named the bottleneck, and the page states both percentages plainly rather than folding them into a single unexplained score. The language used scales with the actual gap between the two — a large gap ("significantly more concentrated") reads differently from a narrow one ("only marginally more concentrated"), because the underlying data for different metals genuinely looks different. Copper, for instance, is concentrated in China at both stages by a similar margin; gold and lithium show a much sharper jump from mining to processing.
Sources
Extraction-stage figures reuse the same USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries data already powering Metal Reserves. Processing, product/demand and recycling figures are individually researched and cited per metal from primary industry organizations — the International Copper Study Group, the World Gold Council, and the International Energy Agency for the three launch metals — with the exact publication and data year shown on every figure.
Confidence Levels
High confidence marks figures computed directly from this site's own stored, verifiable data or a single clean, precisely-stated industry figure (e.g. ICSG's exact secondary-copper-production percentage). Medium marks figures that involved a modeling choice, such as taking the midpoint of a reported range (Swiss gold refining is commonly cited as "65-70%," so 67% is shown). Low marks a figure that measures something adjacent to, but not exactly, what it's shown against — lithium's recycling figure is one example, since the underlying IEA statistic is a feedstock recovery rate dominated by manufacturing scrap, not a clean "share of total supply."
Update Frequency
Chain data is a small, hand-maintained dataset (scripts/seed-metal-chain-data.php), reviewed
and re-sourced roughly annually — the same cadence as the Metal Reserves section's USGS import. It is never
presented as a live feed; each page states its data year and last-reviewed date plainly.
Disclaimer
Metal Chain™ is an analytical framework developed by MetalsCost. Concentration figures and the current-bottleneck comparison are estimates derived from available public data and this documented methodology. They should not be treated as investment advice or a guaranteed forecast.
