Electronic waste in the BRGM Plat'inn hall (Orléans, 2021).
© BRGM - C. Boucley
Challenges and needs
Europe faces a major challenge: in order to successfully achieve carbon neutrality and its energy transition by 2050, it has a growing need for critical metals such as Lithium, cobalt, nickel, rare earths, aluminium, and copper. All these materials are essential for electrifying everyday services and equipment, deploying renewable energy solutions and delivering the digital revolution. However, the European Union is currently heavily dependent on third countries for its supplies of the raw materials.
In response to this dependence, recycling can provide an alternative way to obtain these metals thus diversifying the supply of raw materials.
The FutuRaM (Future Availability of Secondary Raw Materials) project, funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe programme from 2022 to 2026, aimed to achieve a strategic objective: to reduce the European Union’s dependence on critical materials by developing a knowledge base concerning the availability of resources in various categories of waste.
Aims of the project
- Develop a European knowledge base about the availability, recoverability and future potential of secondary raw materials, i.e. raw materials contained in waste.
- Model the stocks and flows of secondary materials up to 2050 to support decision-making based on reliable data.
- Anticipate when these products will reach the end of their life cycle and assess the alignment between the European recycling ecosystem and the expected flows.
- Develop a methodology for classifying recycling projects (the United Nations Framework Classification for Resources, or UNFC).
Results
The researchers involved in FutuRaM analysed all waste streams in Europe: batteries, end-of-life vehicles, industrial and mining waste, construction waste, and dismantled wind turbines. They have just published a key assessment: European waste could meet more than half of the demand for critical metals by 2050, provided that recycling is scaled up significantly and a European industrial sector is established.
In 2022, the EU placed 5.2 million tonnes of critical metals on the market, of which only 1.4 million tonnes were recycled. The rest ended up in landfill or was exported outside Europe, depriving the EU of a valuable resource.
The FutuRaM report sets out several scenarios for the coming decades. The quantity of strategic metals on the market could reach between 8.4 and 12.2 million tonnes, of which between 4.7 and 5.7 million tonnes could be recycled.
The report recommends introducing a standardised European framework for reporting and classifying these materials, consolidating collection and recycling infrastructures, and developing a genuine long-term management strategy.
The Urban Mine Platform: a key tool
The FutuRaM project led to the development of the Urban Mine Platform, a platform that is open to the public and which enables users to explore structured data about the availability and recoverability of secondary raw materials in Europe. The basis of this platform already existed, as the result of a previous project, ProSUM. The FutuRaM project carried out major updates and incorporated new data. It covers seven major waste streams:
- Batteries
- Buildings and demolition waste
- Wind turbines
- End-of-life vehicles
- Mining waste
- Slags and ashes
- WEEE (Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment)
Partners
- The project brought together 28 European partners from industry, the academic sector and public institutions.
- It was coordinated by the WEEE Forum, a major player in the recycling of WEEE in Europe.
- As a project partner, BRGM headed up the specific work relating to the project’s information system and contributed to three case studies on steel-industry waste, mining waste and the extraction of rare earths contained in the permanent magnets of wind turbines.
