Observations over the past decade have revealed that galaxies lose many of the metals they produce to the circumgalactic medium, and that the metals they retain are arranged in complex patterns that go beyond simple radial gradients. Theoretical models for how metals move through and out of the interstellar medium to produce these distributions are still in their infancy. In this talk, I discuss current theoretical and numerical efforts to understand the processes that drive elemental distributions, which combine turbulent transport of metals within disks and loss of imperfectly-mixed metals from the disk into galactic winds. I highlight the major implications of this emerging picture for areas ranging from galaxy formation to stellar populations within the Milky Way.
