We've covered zinc's role in energy, health, and sustainability before, alongside the supply base concentrated in a handful of mega-mines and the production map that has shifted toward Asia since the mid-1990s. The story of 2025 is what changed on the demand side. In November, the U.S. Geological Survey retained zinc on its final 2025 List of Critical Minerals.

In February 2026, the U.S. Geological Survey put a fresh number on a transformation that has been building for a decade: batteries now account for 88% of global lithium end-use, up from 87% a year earlier. The metal that once quietly toughened ceramics and thickened industrial greases has been almost entirely repurposed by the battery economy. As covered in our reporting on the shift from surplus to deficit, the supply side of this story is tightening.

Sensor-based sorting lets miners reject barren rock before it's ever crushed, saving energy, water, and tailings volume at industrial scale. Polymetallic deposits, the orebodies that carry multiple economically valuable metals in a single rock, present a distinctive processing challenge: the valuable minerals are locked together with each other and with vast volumes of barren rock, demanding both heavy grinding and complex multi-stage separation.

On April 21, 2026, at its "Beyond the Pole" Tech Day in Beijing, CATL unveiled the third generation of its Shenxing battery, claiming a 10%-to-98% charge in 6 minutes 27 seconds. The launch came six weeks after BYD unveiled its second-generation Blade Battery with a 10%-to-97% charge in around 9 minutes.