President Donald Trump on Friday rescinded a Biden-era air pollution regulation that had tightened emission limits for copper smelters, marking the latest
rollback of environmental standards in favor of boosting domestic industry.
The 2024 rule, finalized under President Joe Biden, required copper smelters to sharply reduce emissions of hazardous pollutants including lead, arsenic, mercury, benzene, and dioxins. The regulation was part of a broader push to strengthen federal air quality standards for heavy industries.
Under Trump’s new directive, smelters will receive a two-year exemption from the stricter requirements. The White House said the move aims to “bolster American mineral security” by easing what it called “excessive regulatory burdens” on U.S. producers.
“Imposing these requirements on such a limited and already strained domestic industry risks accelerating further closures, weakening the Nation’s industrial base, undermining mineral independence, and increasing reliance on foreign-controlled processing capacity,” the administration said in a statement.
The United States currently operates only two copper smelters—one in Arizona and another in Utah—run by mining giants Freeport-McMoRan and Rio Tinto, neither of which immediately commented on the decision.
Earlier this year, Trump signed an executive order designating copper as a “critical material” essential to defense, infrastructure, and emerging technologies such as clean energy and electric vehicles. That order triggered a Section 232 investigation into whether U.S. dependence on imported copper poses a national security risk.
Following the review, the administration imposed a 50% tariff on select imported copper products and required that a growing share of high-quality domestic scrap copper be sold within the United States.
The rollback underscores Trump’s ongoing effort to strengthen domestic production of key industrial materials—an approach critics say comes at the expense of environmental and public health protections. Photo by Gage Skidmore from Peoria, AZ, United States of America, Wikimedia commons.
