“We still have too many dangerous dependencies. We are more than 80% dependent on China for many critical raw materials. 90% for some rare earths… we need to urgently procure and build up our reserves,” said von der Leyen, reiterating the urgent need to diversify supply chains to avoid dependencies.
In her annual address to the European Parliament on September 16 Wednesday, President of the European Commission Ursula von der Leyen laid out the European Union’s strategic priorities, including procuring and building reserves of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs), necessary for European industrial resilience and security.
Every year in September, the President of the European Commission addresses the European Parliament to take review EU’s achievements and upcoming initiatives, and sharing the EU’s vision for the future.
Von der Leyen’s emphasis on securing CRMs for the EU’s industry and the bloc’s security comes at a time when the CRM-linked supply chains are vulnerable to multiple risks, especially those related to geopolitics. A wide range of key technologies across industries rely extensively on CRMs, such as batteries, chips, electric cars, clean technology and defence. Evidently, the demand for CRMs in the EU is expected to increase significantly in the next few years, propelled by the urgency to transition to a net-zero and digital future which is very material-intensive.
Time to think differently
“So we need to think differently,” stated von der Leyen. “This is why we will establish a new European Corporation on Critical Raw Materials. It will help us obtain and stockpile what we need. For electric cars, chips and batteries, clean tech and defence. And so much more. Not only our industry depends on this, but also our independence and security.”
The stakes are high, but efforts are already ongoing in this direction. Notably, the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) was put in place in 2024 to “secure EU’s critical raw materials capacities along all stages of the value chain.” Within the CRMA, one of the benchmarks for building domestic capacities is to ensure “no more than 65% of EU’s annual needs of each strategic raw material at any relevant stage of processing should come from a single third country.”
Other than possibilities for national exploration initiatives, associated permits required for exploration and access to finance, focusing on the recovery and recycling of CRMs embedded in large amounts of urban waste is also a priority area.
iBot4CRMs is a project of strategic importance to the EU
To this end, iBot4CRMs is making a key contribution.
Funded by Horizon Europe, our project will use AI-powered robotics to recover and recycle critical raw materials from urban waste to build EU’s material sovereignty. For this purpose, the project involves four end-users dealing with major areas of waste management such as car disposal/recycling, urban waste, and EMs recycling.
These end-users will stimulate uptake of iBot4CRMs outcomes as well as targeted developments of AI-powered robots towards successful demonstrations in four pilot trials (i.e., magnets recovery and recycling from electric vehicles “one pilot”, recovery of critical raw materials from shredded cars “one pilot” and from urban waste “two pilots”) and cost-effective business strategy on real world deployment.
You can take a look at our pilot scenarios to understand how we are approaching the recovery and recycling processes for CRMs.
Watch our project video
For more information on our overall objective, watch out project video below: