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1Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minute2Clear out junk files and repair common Windows errors3Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitchesBoron and lithium are individual chemical elements; rare earths are a group of elements; and “critical mineral” is a policy designation—not a chemical category or a synonym for scarce. The labels can overlap: the 2025 U.S. Critical Minerals List includes boron and lithium and identifies rare-earth members individually. Which material is “critical” depends on supply-chain risk and essentiality, not simply how much of it occurs in Earth’s crust.
What each term means
| Term | What it describes | Key distinction |
|---|---|---|
| Boron | A chemical element and mineral commodity | One element, with uses including hardening steel and glass and nuclear energy. |
| Lithium | A chemical element and mineral commodity | One element; batteries are a listed application in the USGS 2026 summary. |
| Rare earths | A group comprising scandium, yttrium, and the lanthanides | A family of elements with different properties and applications; members are considered individually on the U.S. critical-minerals list. |
| Critical mineral | A U.S. policy designation | Reflects economic or national-security importance and vulnerability to supply disruption, not shared chemistry or geological rarity. |
So, boron is not a rare earth, and lithium is not a rare earth. Either element can be a critical mineral under a particular government’s policy framework. The USGS explains the current U.S. designation in its About the 2025 List of Critical Minerals, published November 6, 2025.
How their uses differ
Boron
The USGS lists boron applications that include hardening steel and glass and use in nuclear energy. U.S. boron products sold on the market come from surface mines, underground mines, in situ production, and brine. The USGS says boron is produced domestically only in California and identifies the United States and Turkey as the world’s largest boron producers. These statements concern boron specifically, not critical minerals as a whole. See the USGS Boron Statistics and Information page.
Lithium
The USGS’s Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 lists batteries as an application for lithium. That is a broad application category; it does not mean lithium is the only material needed to make a battery, or that every battery uses the same chemistry. The 2026 summary is the USGS’s earliest comprehensive source for 2025 mineral-production data; its commodity figures answer a different question from the policy designation in the 2025 list. The summary is available from the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026 publication.
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Rare-earth elements
Rare-earth elements do not have one shared end use. Depending on the element, the USGS lists applications such as permanent magnets, lasers, catalysts, fiber optics, glass, ceramics, metallurgy, and medical imaging. Some rare earths are used in permanent magnets, but it is misleading to treat every member of the group as an interchangeable magnet ingredient. The USGS defines the group and summarizes its applications on its Rare Earths Statistics and Information page.
Why a mineral is called critical
“Critical” describes a policy assessment of importance and potential supply vulnerability. It does not say that a material is chemically related to other listed materials, that it is geologically rare, or that it faces the same supply-chain conditions as every other critical mineral.
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The USGS’s 2025 U.S. list contains 60 minerals. Of those, 50 also appeared on the 2022 list, and the methodology assessed more than 1,200 possible disruption scenarios. The list is updated periodically because supply chains and risks change. It includes boron and lithium, while rare-earth elements appear as individual members rather than as one undifferentiated commodity. These figures describe the U.S. list and its 2025 methodology; they are not global counts or a measure of production.
Use the 2025 list to answer whether a material is designated critical by the United States under that list. Use the USGS Mineral Commodity Summaries 2026, version 1.3, revised May 27, 2026, for current commodity information such as production, trade, reserves, and resources. A policy designation and a commodity statistic are related, but they are not interchangeable.
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Does “rare earth” mean rare?
Not necessarily. “Rare earth” is the name of an element group, not a claim that every member is scarce in the crust. The USGS overview reports crustal abundances ranging from about 60 parts per million for cerium to about 0.5 parts per million for thulium and lutetium. The overview does not state the year for those estimates.
Crustal abundance is only one geological measure. It does not tell you how much material occurs in economically recoverable deposits, how much is mined, how much processing capacity is available, or how exposed a supply chain is to disruption. The USGS abundance figures therefore cannot establish a universal scarcity ranking between rare earths, boron, and lithium.
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How to compare them without conflating the terms
- For chemical classification: compare element with element, or treat rare earths explicitly as a group. Boron and lithium are individual elements; rare earths are a family.
- For applications: compare specific uses, and distinguish among rare-earth members rather than assuming the whole group has one use.
- For criticality: specify the jurisdiction and list year. The designation discussed here is the U.S. 2025 list.
- For supply: identify the measure—such as mine production, processing, imports, reserves, or disruption exposure—and its date. One measure cannot stand in for all the others.
- For geological abundance: name the abundance measure and source. Crustal abundance is not the same as mineable supply or supply security.
There is no supported universal ranking that makes boron, lithium, and rare earths simply “more” or “less” scarce or supply-risky than one another. They are different kinds of categories, used for different purposes.
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