EU Raw Materials Week

The fourth edition of the EU Raw Materials Week took place from Monday 18 to Friday 22 November 2019, in Brussels.

It built up on a series of events organised by the European Commission addressing the latest news on raw materials in the EU.

It was a unique opportunity for the raw materials community to discuss and exchange on all relevant issues: policy, technology, international cooperation, framework conditions, knowledge base etc.

Critical Raw Materials at the event

On Monday, the third EU Critical Raw Materials Event took place. After opening remarks and a coffee break reserved for networking, the event started with presentations about criticality definitions and the importance for companies to be informed about their individual risks and ways of addressing them. The following panel discussion followed up on the preceding presentations and showed ways of reducing criticality for different countries and stakeholders. After a networking lunch, the third session of the event presented research results about how the supply with CRM can be increased – not only via improving production, but also substitution of the materials to reduce dependencies. The final session showed how supply can meet the ever increasing demand of CRM by secondary sourcing – recovering metals from finished products. In doing so, the importance and role of CRMs in a circular economy was also be discussed.

On Tuesday, the 9th triateral talks between the EU, the US and Japan took place. Further, there was be a meeting of the IRTC consortium on Wednesday.

Both the Critical Raw Materials Event and the IRTC consortium meeting were (co-) organised by ESM Foundation.