Again, I greatly appreciate your thoughtful commentary.

Are you saying that 74% of lead discarded in the US is sent for recycling, or that of the part sent for recycling, 74% is successfully recovered, the other 26% being lost in various kinds of waste, or what? "74%" does show up in your source https://prd-wret.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/assets/palladium... as the "percentage recycled" for lead in 2012 (table 1), which is explained as "Calculated by dividing the amount recycled by the apparent supply". On its face, this seems to suggest that 74% of the lead bought by lead consumers, such as battery manufacturers, was sourced from recycling, while the other 26% came from mining or importation, without providing any information about losses in the recycling process. Aluminum has 50% for 2016 in that same table (down from 57% in 2012), but only about 10% of aluminum is lost to oxidation during recycling.

The interesting question from my point of view is how the available waste compares to natural ores, whether that waste is from recycling losses such as dust around smelting mills, or from other sources such as treasure hunting, in the difficulty of recovering useful material from it. Since the concentrations of many interesting elements are orders of magnitude higher than their natural concentrations in ores — particularly in elements like the lanthanoids which, as you point out, do not concentrate very much† — my naïve supposition is that landfill mining will be considerably cheaper. (Moreover, because landfills are at the surface, it can be done without the risks of the black-damp or the stink-damp, though perhaps surprise PCB-filled transformers might compensate.)

As for H–B, it can be carried out perfectly well on electrolytic hydrogen, but that is only economic in the absence of a source of methane, or when energy is abundant.

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I love the way you dis "technology". In your mindmap I think there is a very significant thing missing, one which, as an illegal immigrant in a third-world country, I am constantly aware of.

What's missing? Well, suppose you want to replicate Watt's vacuum steam engine; let's analyze it in your framework, and see what's missing.

You need some kind of fuel, both to shape the metal and to run the steam engine once it's finished.

You need materials — at a minimum, you need some kind of material that can withstand the steam while holding the precise tolerances needed to seal the cylinder, and you need some kind of sealing material, whether that's hemp, leather, rubber, or the cast-iron, bronze, or carbon steel for Ramsbottom's miraculous piston rings. (And, yeah, something for lubrication.)

You need the technical knowledge ("process and system knowledge" in your diagram) to shape and assemble the parts of the engine, and the causal knowledge ("symbolic expression and manipulation") to troubleshoot it, fix it, and improve its design for your situation.

Although it may not be absolutely necessary, the network dynamics that enable you to obtain all of the above, and distribute the fruits of your steam-engine, are certainly an immense boon. Similarly for systems management ("Governance, Management, & Organization" in your diagram).

I'm not sure that you need much in the way of information processing, power transmission, or hygiene to build your steam engine.

So, suppose you have all these things; you're a master machinist and mechanical engineer in a post-apocalyptic village just uphill from a spring with an urgent need to irrigate their fields (the network dynamics). You have an ample supply of scrap metal of all kinds, plenty of books on steam-engine design, and friends who are willing to risk their lives operating your steam-engine once it gets built. The alpine forest nearby provides all the firewood you could need. What are you missing?

You don't have any tools! You aren't going to get very far building a steam engine by banging bits of scrap metal together. You need to invest in some capital goods, which are classically considered one of the three primary factors of production, along with land and labor. You're going to need a foundry with crucibles and casting flasks; a lathe, with gears or a whip to drive it, at least some centers and a dog if not a chuck; vises; hammers; drills; hardened steel cutting tools for the lathe, and abrasive tools to sharpen them with; files for detail work; at least some vernier calipers if not micrometers, and probably scales, surface plates, indicators, and a balance; and some way to measure the composition of your scrap metal, of which I have no idea. You can bootstrap these from raw materials, but getting there is going to require some further intermediate tools — at least a pottery kiln, and probably also a wood shop and some means for assaying soils.

This is an amusing omission because, in my experience, it's common both for the vulgar to confuse tools such as cellphones with "technology" as a whole, which of course includes the whole technological matrix that you're analyzing; and for ignorant rulers to believe that the crucial ingredient in economic prosperity is for an outside company to open a factory in your town, thus "providing work".

Speaking of ignorant rulers, maybe this is in some sense implicit in your "network dynamics" or "Governance, Management, & Organization" categories, but I think it deserves special attention: a major obstacle to technological development always and everywhere is violence, in a couple of different forms. First, outright witch-burning is a constant threat, as experienced by Giordano Bruno, the Maya codices, Steve Kurtz, Aaron Swartz, Charles Lieber, and numerous others; second, and not entirely separate, unfreedom, expropriation, and wanton destruction, all by means of collective violence, destroyed Shuman's Solar Engine One, the first RepRap, Archimedes' life, Galileo's career, and Zuse's Z1, and nipped many other promising developments in the bud.

But such violence does not arise in isolation; it proceeds from a social climate that nurtures and foments it, which can impede progress even when it doesn't erupt into outright vandalism and murder. So I think there's a certain necessary element of tolerance and admiration of technical excellence whose lack strangles any hope of progress in most social climates. Not only did they laugh at Fulton, the Wright Brothers, and Bozo the Clown, they laughed at William Kamkwamba; how many other Kamkwambas has Malawi lost that way?

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† It isn't true that lanthanoids don't form ores at all; monazite and bastnäsite are ores of lanthanoids (as well as actinoids). Cerium in the earth's crust, for example, is about 60 ppm on average, but typically almost half (which would be 500 000 ppm) of either of these ores, so it's more concentrated there by three or four orders of magnitude. The difficulty is that they all form the same ore because they're damn near identical, chemically speaking, which is why many of them were among the last elements to be isolated. But this is very much not the case with landfill, in which the lanthanoids are conveniently separated not only from one another but from the hazardous actinoids — although cigarette-lighter flints have many lanthanoids, if you're mining catalytic converters, they'll be entirely free of both thorium and lanthanum.