How can circularity be embedded in clean energy value chains?
How can the coffee sector be made more sustainable?
What can the livestock sector learn from the energy sector?
How do we distinguish among climate-related risks?
How can we lower the cost of capital for transition projects in emerging markets?
What are Investor-State Dispute settlements?
How can we meaningfully orient financial institutions toward our global climate goals?
How can we improve financing pathways for the energy transition?
What are the systemic barriers to scaling blended finance?
Can mining activities springboard sustainable development?
What does it take to design industrial policy?
How can resource-rich countries go down-stream in the mineral value chain?
How can governments and corporates approach transition planning?
What are the costs and benefits of investment treaties and investor-state arbitration?
How can countries exit harmful investment treaties?
Metals-as-a-Service (MaaS)
Developing a model where companies lease critical minerals instead of selling them. This approach helps keep materials in use beyond end-of-life, secures critical mineral supply, and turns lease payments into tradeable assets. In partnership with the Carbon Trust, we worked directly with miners, manufacturers, recyclers, and investors to test and shape the MaaS model so it works in practice.
The problem: Demand for metal is outpacing supply
Wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and power grids all require large quantities of copper, nickel, lithium, cobalt, and silver. Current estimates suggest the energy transition will require roughly 6.5 billion tonnes of materials. For several of these metals, forecasts show demand approaching (and in some scenarios exceeding) known reserves. For others, the supply bottlenecks arising from time to production, export controls, and high supply concentration are evident.
Mining alone cannot close that gap. Much of the answer is already above ground, in metals sitting in products, infrastructure, and waste. Recovering and reusing them will be essential to meeting clean energy demand.
Today’s metals system is linear by design and is built to extract, use, and discard most durable materials. This requires new extraction, which will not deliver the volumes or the ore quality the transition requires.
The solution: Tapping into the urban mine through Metals-as-a-Service
What if we looked above ground first? Vast amounts of metal are already in use in buildings, power lines, vehicles, and equipment. Rather than relying on new extraction alone, Metals-as-a-Service (MaaS) treats the metal already in use as a resource. It is a novel approach to addressing the pressures on metal value chains, such as declining ore quality, long lead times for new mines, and rising environmental costs, by reshaping how metals are owned, financed, circulated, and recovered.
Servitization grants metal users the right to use a metal, while ownership remains with one actor of the value chain. It has taken off in other capital intensive sectors, such as batteries, cooling, and chemicals. Applied to metals, customers can now be granted the right to use a metal, while securing access to metal supply and limiting exposure to metal price volatility.. The metal owner leases the metal instead of selling it, so they have an incentive to recover it at end-of-life and put it back into use.
The strategic value of MaaS is far-reaching. Metal producers gain recurring revenues and long-term customer relationships. It reduces upfront capital expenditure (CAPEX) for project developers and original equipment manufacturers by converting metal procurement into predictable, recurring operational expenditure (OPEX). It strengthens supply security by unlocking both primary metal streams and high-quality secondary feedstock from the “urban mine,” and it creates a new asset class by securitizing the metal-backed lease flows.
Implementing MaaS
The Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) is the backbone to execute this business model. SPVs are already well-established financing approaches in mining, metals, and energy projects, which require large capital and have long-lived assets. Unlike individual value chain participants, who are optimized for specific roles (processing, manufacturing, operations), the SPV’s mandate in implementing MaaS is lifecycle integration.
An SPV therefore becomes a distinct vehicle through which investors can fund a Metal Bank. The asset owner procures metal that sits in the Metal Bank, which is essentially an inventory pool of metal stock wholly owned by the asset owner that ensures long-term access to metals by establishing a predictable source of supply, generating recurring yield for the original asset owner, and creating tradable exposure to circular metals.
Financing MaaS
Making Metal-as-a-Service (MaaS) commercially viable requires more than demonstrating that metal can be reused. It requires knowing where recoverable metal is, identifying opportunities to acquire it, establishing the economics of recirculation, and structuring contracts that can attract finance. The five tools below address these complementary challenges, from mapping material stocks and identifying undervalued assets to standardizing contracts and mobilizing investment at scale.
A stock-and-flow model (built with Dynamic Material Flow Analysis) is an accounting method for materials. It tracks how much metal is sitting inside the economy (the “urban mine” of buildings, infrastructure, and wind turbines) and how fast it moves in and out through production, wear, and recycling.
For a MaaS business, this answers the practical questions that make or break a deal:
How much recoverable metal is out there, when it will return, and from where.
Whether the metal comes back in good enough condition to rent again, which is what the residual value, and therefore the pricing, rests on.
A bottom-up look at balance sheets to identify assets
Standard accounting depreciates equipment to a book value of zero at the end of its “useful life,” but the metal is still physically there and still worth something; it has a residual value. That gap is an opportunity: by screening company balance sheets—firms heavy in plant and equipment, low on liquid assets, or in financial distress—a MaaS business model can identify and acquire this overlooked metal cheaply, as a ready-made urban mine.
Stock-and-flow data helps spot where the metal embedded value sits, and a live MaaS model then supplies the tracking to turn rough estimates into verifiable quantities–creating a feedback loop that strengthens MaaS’s functionality and impact.
A companion metric, the Levelized Cost of MaaS (whose concept is borrowed from the Levelized Cost of Energy LCOE in the energy sector), lets a company check whether the model beats the linear one, and shows the levers to pull: keep less metal idle, redeploy it faster, sequence high-grade metal to the uses that need it, and build a track record that lowers financing costs over time.
MaaS models benefit from treating metals as economically substitutable or “fungible” – this means it is not necessary to receive the exact same piece of metal that was initially delivered, as long as an equivalent amount of metal of the contractually defined quality is recovered. This enables residual value to be pooled, contracts to be standardized, and liquidity to improve through shorter contract durations, provided that recovery, testing, and reprocessing pathways are clearly specified.
The core idea is that MaaS contracts behave like bonds. This bond-like structure makes MaaS contracts tradable financial assets rather than consumables. Once the SPV holds a portfolio, it pools the contracts and issues asset-backed securities against them. A portfolio of these assets will then be securitized, distributing risk to investors while creating liquidity for sponsors.
From volume-based to performance-based pricing
The bigger shift is charging for what the metal does, not how much it weighs—moving from dollars-per-ton to performance-based pricing. Dynamic Material Flow Analysis, combined with sensors, digital twins, and simple tracking, makes performance measurable. It reframes metal as the source of a service rather than a simple commodity.
A concrete example: copper transmits electricity better than aluminum, so instead of selling the copper, a business can charge for that superior performance over time. The same logic already runs the aviation industry, where engine makers sell “power by the hour”, where the airline pays for thrust, efficiency, and reliability, not for the engine itself.
We have laid out three pricing options a MaaS business model can grow into:
Performance-based contract: the user pays purely for the service delivered, and if performance drops, payments drop with it. The owner bears all the risk that the metal will wear out. Best for mature, well-monitored markets.
Volume renting plus a performance “swap” : a familiar per-ton rental with an “insurance” layer on top: the user pays a small premium, and the owner guarantees a baseline performance, stepping in to recover and replace the metal if it falls below the floor of agreed performance. A bridge for markets still used to volume-based contracts.
Add a “swaption” : an extra layer that offers protection against future price hikes, like a cap on the rent when a lease renews. It shields the user from paying more in subsequent cycles if conditions worsen. Useful where the environment is volatile, and deployments are long-term.
Each of these pricing mechanisms shifts more risk away from the user.
Our approach
The MaaS model was built and refined through a series of linked engagements between May 2025 and October 2026, each building on the one before and each shaped by a community of practice comprising actors across mining, recycling, trading, manufacturing, finance, and policy.
The project’s resources, including slide decks from community meetings, webinar materials, and reports from different stages of the project, are available through the download resources button.
Authors
Mining, Metals and Resource-based Development
Further Reading
Financing Climate & Sustainable Development / Report
Financing Indonesia’s Green Industrialization: System Pathways, Structural Diagnosis, and Tailored Solutions
Integrating Circular Economy Principles and Practices in Indonesia’s Nickel Sector: Overview, Benefits, and Enabling Conditions
Mining, Metals and Resource-based Development / Report
Green Industrialization in Indonesia: Landscape and Trends in the Energy Sector and Critical Minerals Value Chains, with a Focus on Nickel
More from CCSI
The Resilience Gap Laid Bare
Mining, Metals and Resource-based Development / Blog
From Minerals to Development: New Connections for a New Era
What It Takes to Make Critical Mineral Recovery Bankable and Insurable
Companion Report: Economic Analysis
The Feedback Loop between MaaS, Stock-and-Flow Models, and Performance Pricing
Optional background reading handed out prior to the Metals-as-a-Service Closed-Door Strategy Workshop
Metals-as-a-Service July 15, 2025 Workshop Outcome Document
Metals-as-a-Service July 9, 2026 Workshop Outcome Document: Tools to make MaaS work
Metals-as-a-Service Webinar Slides
Metals-as-a-Service Closed-Door Strategy Workshop
MaaS Overview - New York Climate Week 2026
Metals-as-a-Service Workshop: Tools to make MaaS work