Rio Tinto is turning waste or by-products into valuable national resources through innovation across the copper value chain. Collaborating with government, universities, and industry partners, Rio Tinto is creating an ecosystem to mitigate production risk and create socially responsible and economically viable pathways to get new critical mineral resources into the supply chain. Many critical metals are only produced as secondary products. Once primary metals, such as copper, lead, and zinc, are concentrated and smelted, it becomes feasible to separate and extract trace co-product metals such as antimony, arsenic, bismuth, cadmium, selenium, tellurium, and others. Understanding the occurrence and deportment of these metals is crucial for their recovery. However, their low concentration and complex spatial distribution within the ore bodies present a challenge for analysis, mapping, and recovery. Efforts across the copper value stream are revealing new opportunities for developing co-production processes for numerous critical metals including platinum group metals (PGMs), bismuth, indium, germanium, gallium, nickel, cobalt, arsenic, and rare earth elements. For instance, the USA heavily depends on imports of bismuth, primarily obtained as a by-product of primary lead or tungsten mining, and similarly, platinum group metals can be co-products of copper production. Rio Tinto is actively pursuing new process routes for bismuth, palladium, platinum, and other critical mineral co-products from copper processing. Herein, we provide an overview of the efforts undertaken in developing these value streams, from innovation to implementation.