EUROPEAN COMMISSION “CRITICAL RAW MATERIALS ACT”

The EU Commission has adopted the “Critical Raw Materials Act,” which suggests actions to ensure the EU’s access to a secure, diversified, affordable, and sustainable supply of critical raw materials that are essential for a wide range of strategic sectors, including specifically technologies for decarbonizing industry, digital, aerospace, and defense.
Indeed, Europe is highly dependent on imports, and often from near-monopolistic third-country suppliers: the EU needs to mitigate the risks to supply chains associated with such strategic dependencies so as to strengthen its economic resilience.
Critical raw materials legislation will provide the EU with the tools to ensure its access to a secure and sustainable supply, primarily through the following actions.

• Establishment of clear priorities for action (indication of strategic raw materials list, definition of benchmarks regarding national capacities along the supply chain)
• Creating secure and resilient EU critical raw materials supply chains (reducing administrative burdens, simplifying licensing procedures, supporting access to finance)
• Ensuring that the EU can mitigate supply risks (monitoring of critical raw materials supply chains, coordination of strategic raw materials stocks among member states)
• Investment in research, innovation and skills (adoption and diffusion of innovative technologies)
• Environmental protection by improving the circularity and sustainability of critical raw materials (sustainable development of critical raw material value chains, adoption and implementation of national measures to improve the collection of critical raw material-rich wastes and ensure their recycling into secondary critical raw materials)
• International engagement (diversification of the Union’s imports of critical raw materials, intensification of trade actions, further development of strategic partnerships)

Read more at the following link.