Availability of secondary raw materials

With the greening of the European economy, more and more materials are recovered from waste are and finding new applications in the wide economy. This is at the core of the concept of Circular Economy (CE).

To enable this evolution, two important factors need to be in place:

  • Finding waste containing interesting materials for recycling (metals, chemicals, materials…)

  • Developing the corresponding recycling processes.

Finding Waste containing interesting materials for recycling

Because Europe has limited natural primary resources, chiefly for manufacturing batteries, it is important to locate sources of, for example, Co, Ni, Li, Rare Earths, .. Within Europe.

Two main routes can be followed:

  • Mining waste: tailings from previous (closed) mining operations in Europe still containing interesting materials for recycling. With the development of modern technologies, it is sometimes possible to extract some materials left a long time ago in the tailings. In the same way, some mining operations can be re-started thanks to new, cheaper technologies.

  • Urban Mining: the idea here is to recover useful materials from waste produced in the EU.

Therefore it is important to map the mining waste and the urban mine in Europe to uncover the possibilities.

ProSUM is a European-funded project which stands for Prospecting Secondary raw materials from the Urban Mine and Mining waste.

It is a free database containing a wealth of information on quantities of recoverable materials in waste like WEEE and batteries.

Further readings