SEC Lecture: Creating Circularity for Critical Raw Materials

with Prof. Christoph Helbig (University of Bayreuth, Germany)

Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) are materials with high supply risks and high vulnerability to supply restrictions. Demand for CRMs is expected to grow drastically over the next decades because they are essential for clean and renewable energy, digitalization, and defense. Therefore, large efforts worldwide in politics and industry are undertaken to secure the increasing demand for CRMs, such as the European Critical Raw Materials Act. Increased production rates bear the risk of additional environmental impacts contributing to the triple planetary crisis: climate change, biodiversity loss, and pollution. These environmental impacts can be mitigated partially if the demand is fulfilled with anthropogenic resources. However, CRMs have low circularity rates and high loss rates in the economy. The average lifetime of 30 metals in the periodic table is 10 years or even shorter because products, waste management, and recycling systems are not optimized for keeping Critical Raw Materials in the loop. To change this, we need a vision for a circularity and sustainability transition that includes all aspects of the Circular Economy: low-carbon production technologies, resource-light business models, effective regulations supporting circularity, and selective and efficient recycling processes.

MAT_STOCKS – Understanding the Role of Material Stock Patterns for the
Transformation to a Sustainable Society.
https://boku.ac.at/understanding-the-role-of-material-stock-patterns-for-the-transformation-to-a-sustainable-society-mat-stocks

CircEUlar – Developing circular pathways for a EU low-carbon Transition.
www.circeular.org

0:00 Intro
0:15 Lecture
48:22 Q & A

yeah we’ll be talking about creating circularity for critical raw materials uh and I’m very much already already looking forward to the discussion later um I will talk about mainly three different things after a brief introduction I will talk about critical raw materials what is that exactly what are we’re talking about when we speak about critical raw materials uh we’ll talk about circul IT issues throughout the periodic table um what kind of issues we have there what’s the current status of that uh and the circularity and why that matters for critical raw materials and then in the end I will talk a little bit about a vision for circularity um wasn’t quite sure about the last part’s title maybe it’s not exactly a vision but uh we’ll we’ll get back to that um yeah I’m an industriy so what what do we do in industrial ecology we assess material and energy flows of the past the present and the future in order to identify the environmental impacts that those material flows have and this specifically relevant in times of uh the triple planetary crisis where materials lead to climate change problems biodiversity losses I will not talk a lot about that today uh and pollution issues and we of course also want to change things so it’s very often um a perspective of how can we make things a little bit better uh at least or sufficiently enough better so that planetary boundaries are met again and well thanks to a lot of the work that has also been done here uh at Boku we know that we are in a stockpiling Society rather than actually a throwaway Society extraction flows are increasing drastically stocks are increasing even more rapidly and waste flows are also also on the rise uh and today I’m going to talk mostly about this tiny little blue part here which is sometimes forgotten and sometimes is a little bit problematic to make visible in the graphs because obviously Aggregates and um and and uh asphalt and concrete and all these kinds of construction materials uh make up just just so much more of the materials um but even within that blue part we have huge uh differences and I will talk about that later on these impacts matter we know that we should get to Net Zero carbon emissions for carbon dioxide we currently around 40 gatons per year we know that biodiversity loss is rapid and that Global pollution with plastic WS particulate matter and other persistent chemicals are a global problem that we need to challenge and large parts of those impacts are material related this graph is from the uh band the trend report from the international resource panel and in red here highlighted um are material related issues for climate impacts this is quite a bit half of that maybe but includes fossil resources directly particle methods uh matter uh Health impacts are also very relevant uh look at for example specifically here the non-metallic minerals or in Green in yellow or orangish uh the metals bars which are very relevant here uh the Water stress and biodiversity issues that’s mostly issue of biomass use I will not talk a lot about this today if we then specifically go into greenhouse gas emissions um we can go uh into a publication from from lambin colleagues where they worked on disaggregating the global carbon emissions now this is greenhouse gas emissions overall so therefore it’s about 60 gatons uh in 2018 uh and disaggregated first into those Mega sectors energy sector uh industry agriculture forestry and other land use transport sector and the buildings sector um but of course well very often electricity and heat that’s not necessarily a demand for itself but we use that for other sectors so we can disaggregate that further and this list is quite extensive yeah me you might not be able to see everything thing of that but therefore I have highlighted the most relevant ones for you and it strikes that on the fourth position already comes Metals so about 8% some statistics say 9% some statistics say 7% depends a little bit on how exactly you count but let’s say 8% of the global greenhouse gas emissions come because we mine Metals we process Metals uh and that does not include chemicals that does not include wood Etc but that means just Metals all through the periodic table so therefore if we want to get to Net Zero we will have to tackle those 8% as well and that will be quite a challenge it will be specifically a challenge because these metals are so different I work in my research all the way through the periodic table and that’s a variety probably you have seen such a periodic table maybe it’s been a while and some times it’s difficult to recall what exactly each abbreviation was might have heard that a while ago but of course nobody really remembers all 60 of them there about 60 Metals in the periodic table that are chemically stable not radioactive and all of them have an economic use e every single one of them is used for some purpose but they are very different I’ll just pick out one number and that’s the production volume within the same group we have iron and we have osmium for iron we produce about two gigatons per year globally two billion tons for osmium one ton that’s it that fits under this desk if it was a full cube obviously it isn’t because it’s mostly used as a catalyst and therefore you want to have a lot of surface so you don’t make cubes out of osmium but it’s just one PA so working on data which covers nine orders of magnitude that’s a challenge we just had this discussion earlier today or yeah sometimes some of the data is basically focused only on bulk materials where you have a lot of the materials and not on those kind of Specialty Metals in colors you see one of the many options to deviate those 60 Metals into different parts you can talk about Ferris metals and we’re talking mostly about steel and alloying elements for steel we can talk about non- feris Metals that’s from anything from wires to semiconductors to Lad in your starter battery for cars um we can talk about rare Earth’s element we’ll talk a little bit about that later today uh and then there’s the rest sometimes that’s called technology medals sometimes that’s called specialty medals um but but mostly it’s a yeah it’s a basket where you throw in everything else which doesn’t fit into those Mega uh categories and yeah in my research I work on data which is related to all of them and we’ll we’ll have a look into the later on but let’s first look at those large materials so these are historic production data from Iron and Steel until like 2015 or something like that and then projections into the future estimations of how much of those materials we really need in 2030 2050 2,100 so in a few decades 2030 actually isn’t that far away um you see also this rapid increase for both between 2000 and 2015 that’s China as for a lot of the materials also construction materials we see the huge China effect which is just increased capacities for production half of the production of Steel is happening in China half of the production of aluminum globally is happening in China so therefore this is a huge of usually this more more recent increase is has happened in China recently but we also see that this continuing this is this is a continuous growth and if we think back about this 8% of the global greenhouse gas emissions that come back to the metals well these will make an impact steel that’s about 5% of global greenhouse gas emissions aluminum one and a half so these are of course the two largest parts then there’s copper and then there all all the 60 others so it it adds up to the 9% overall and of course all of these will have to decarbonize if we talk about that and the demands for the others here summarized in a work from takatar and and colleagues is also on the rise equal um estimations in this case for 2030 and 2050 only sometimes for these specialty medals it becomes a little bit problematic and complicated to make estimations for a few decades into the future you see therefore also the estimates go well maybe even further apart uh as they were for iron and aluminum um but these are drastically increasing and here you already see this separation some of these Metals um coincident it was all on the right not sure if this was intended by the authors um but coincidently all of these on the right are here in red critical or even critical and strategic raw materials I’ll get back to those two terms and all of them on the left were not critical materials according to the EU definition and um one one colleague from from tosing in in southern Bavaria nicely said ear uh last year we can def fossilize the economy but we can’t Dem metalize it so working without metal stocks will be impossible and a lot of the technologies that we rely on for decarbonization or def fossilization they rely on a lot of these technology metals or Specialty Metals now that brings me directly to this term of critical raw materials what exactly is that first part then we’ll talk second part but the circularity issues so a first important part is there’s different conceptions of critical raw materials uh and I will talk about a few of them will mostly talk about the EU definition uh and but the very important is that some definitions work with critical raw materials lists that means a material is either critical or it’s not which is good if you want to do policy recommendations which is good if you want to do laws or regulations because then it’s clear you’re either on the list or you’re not but it’s not very good if you want to measure progress or it’s not very good if you want to um make decisions support what you can do or how to improve something because if you’re still on the list after your measure what have you got gotten so therefore these lists are very often on a policy level EU criticality lists us criticality list Etc but there exists also this other perspective that critical raw materials are have an they have an aspect or a grade of criticality um so therefore we can differentiate between those on the list criticality assessments which have thresholds and those gradual measurements of for example specifically Supply risk assessments which also comp can use in order to identify where are the pitfalls where should we improve and how can we improve the second prease or early notice is that criticality assessments should have something like a risk perspective and in Risk assessments we work with these two terms of likelihood of an event and severity or or damage caused by this event and something is very um high risk if it’s both likely and problematic if the event if the event happens so of course um if you’re in a in a flooding Zone just coming from Southern Bavaria last week U was very problematic to get from A to B um apparently here in Vienna it was much easier um if something is in an area where there’s frequent flooding but there’s no houses well where’s the risk if it’s an area where there’s a lot of houses a lot of people living but flooding events happen just very rarely also it might not be an issue but if both things come together then you need to make uh protection measurements and with criticality assessments it’s quite similar but a very different Logic the problem is getting the supply so it’s a very supply oriented assessment we want to gain the materials that are required for the economy and sometimes maybe you can even question whether these are really required for the economy but then this is then the the socioeconomic part of that in many regards this should be an assessment of a supply risk in terms of likelihood of a supply disruption and a vulnerability assessment in terms of what happens if that Supply disruption actually really happens and you can see from the terminology that well this is common for criticalities assessment that they call this a supply risk but actually in the terminology of iso risk assessments this is not risk it’s just the likelihood assessment so when people talk about Supply risks what they mean is likelihood of Supply disruptions it does not mean that it would be a problem maybe this is a highly um uncertain supply of a material which you don’t need well then why should you care so that is a an assessment result that could happen if the material is just down here in this corner so increasing criticality should be something that’s up in that corner there are criticality assessments which you just use one dimension which don’t use this Matrix style assessment there are criticality assessments which use more dimensions three dimensions four dimensions you will find that in the literature but I will talk mostly about these two uh this these two dimensions in this Matrix style of assessment now why is this relevant also right now so the European commission has um very rapidly gone through a process of going through a critical raw materials assessment in terms of a critical raw materials act so in 2011 there was the first criticality assessment and then every three years there came a new criticality assessment that nothing but not a lot of policy followed with that but at the end of 2022 actually the European commission um under uh the funion um EU government or EU commission um they started the process publicly to get feedback on a potential critical raw materials act and now one and a half years later already it’s in Force if we compare that to other EU legislations which go through a lot of multiple reiterations this is very fast so the first draft was just out in March last year uh and the trialogue preliminary um agreement was in November already and then in March um 2024 it was um accepted and now it’s in force for two weeks so very very recent and what does this critical ra materials act actually say Well it first of all gets you targets so these are EU wide General bulk targets we want to get 10% of the demand for critical raw materials to be more precise strategic raw materials we get to that um from EU sources 10% overall at least so 10% of the of the EU demand shall be met from domestic production 40% from domestic processing so of course we know well for some materials we just don’t have any resources in the ground we don’t have any geological uh reserves therefore we need to bank on Imports but we would like to process them here in order to gain more of the value chain and 25 uh of um the demand shall be met by domestic recycling this is interesting in the initial draft it was just 15% and then throughout the trialog process all of a sudden was 25% so they got more ambitious not less ambitious which we also sometimes have in those uh trilog processes then there’s strategic and critical raw materials I’ll get to that in the next slide and the question is what what exactly do you want to do well the one large part is strategic projects so there’s a lot about like um um permitting processes how uh strategic per permiting for mining operations quaring uh as well as recycling facilities will happen um I was expecting that this whole idea would fail for the Strategic project and that member states would be would be much more reluctant that the EU actually dictates how um permitting processes work in member states but apparently it was not an issue maybe I got it wrong in the beginning um and there’s some information on circularity and actually also environmental footprint I will not talk about that um and then there’s a lot of risk monitoring and strategic Partnerships and that kind of things so in Annex 2 of the critical raw materials act it defines how the EU commission and therefore the whole European Union shall Define critical raw materials and it’s this nicely or weirdly looking graph which combines information on whether materials are substitutable whether um they come from important sectors in the European e economy or whether they are used in those rather to say whe whether the supply is very concentrated very often China but not always um and whether we have some recycling on that and it funnels into two benchmarks so to speak Supply risk and economic importance they are those two Dimensions that we just saw so the European commission talks about economic importance when they mean vulnerability and they also talk about virus if there is an Annex 2 there probably is an Annex one and that Annex one says that there are also strategic raw materials and those strategic raw materials are defined by materials where there’s an high demand increase due to strategic sectors also it defines that strategic raw materials need to have a high prod uction scale and a lad Reserve to production ratio which is actually interesting because in the critical criticality assessment there was no information about geology no information about reserves or scarcity of a material it was just trading now in the Strategic raw materials we need a lot we need it for strategic sectors and there isn’t much basically but there’s no quantitative public information about how exactly that happened and how the EU commission came up with a list of critical raw materials then it even came up with a proposal and then member states said oh actually we would like to have aluminum on that list as well so therefore and they said oh actually it’s not just natural graphite it’s synthetic graphite as well so it should also be on the list of strategic raw materials so they expanded those those kinds of Assessments at all and the one thing that they did and I personally think this is a huge flaw because it undermines terminology uh they said well every CR every strategic War material is automatically also a critical Ro material so they have this very uh sorry they have this hello they have this very neatly the line harmonized since 2017 assessment but they don’t follow it because if it’s a strategic material then skip that and put it on the list and that happened uh copper and nickel we’ll get back to that why exactly they are strategic ra materials although they shouldn’t be critical raw materials so therefore they are now on the critical raw materials list all accounts count for them as well but well actually there is no Supply risk for those or at least not according to the EU framework why is that important so these are this these are the the Strategic sectors that the EU commission looks at lithium ion batteries all the way to airospace uh air aircraft space drones a lot of automation additive manufacturing a lot of energy Technologies low carbon industry Technologies digitalization and that kind of things so quite a quite a range obviously and these sectors are on the rise they are drastically rising and the jrc joint research center of the European commission our European Union has assessed the amount of materials that we would need for these compared to how much of that we produce currently so they assess that for lithium graphite Cobalt nickel Etc we need much more potentially in the future you can recall from the names probably it’s got something to do with lithium ion batteries um then we currently produce globally just from these future Technologies that have been defined beforehand and if they are then therefore important for these sectors they will be defined as critical R materials and this is the official um I me I re reg made a graph but this is the official data for um the uh criticality Matrix and you see all that are in this upper threshold are called critical raw materials and nickel and Cobalt don’t actually have Supply risks therefore they shouldn’t be but they are still on the list because they are strategic raw materials they are the only strategic raw materials of a list of 15 that have not uh gotten above the threshold you also see well actually most of them are above the threshold this dash line of economic importance anyway so it’s not very important where you land on this economic importance because most of the time most of the materials are above that threshold anyways and you can’t actually do a lot about this economic importance measurement because basically the main important uh factor for the EU commission to determine if a raw material is is economically important or not is whether it’s in the automobile industry or not because basically what they only look at is statistical data what’s the value added of the sectors where a material is used in well we use tungsten only for machines and cars and well there’s a large sector in the EU statistical data therefore is on the right side so you can’t really change that because you will not change the applications right but you might be able to change the the supply risks so the most important part is whether a material is considered really having high Supply risks or not and this is something where the critical R materials act also draws on to reduce potentially those Supply risks not reduce the economic importance of the materials that wouldn’t make sense and those Supply risks can be measured and they can be managed um these are the 10 in a variety of Supply risk assessments the 10 most used Supply risks aspects and I put a European flag everywhere where the European Commission in some of their assessments either critical critical raw materials or strategic raw materials has made an assessment of that material uh they use concentration data so how much concentrated is a is a is is a market they use the scarcity now also political instability is used regulations are used and then BYU uh dependence on by and primary production is used so basically recycling information demand growth is used substitutability is used and import dependence the only two aspects that the European commission doesn’t look as look at is price volatility and byproduct dependence because by prodependence well would be quite geological and there’s not a lot of mining happening in Europe anyways um except for a few Metals so these can be measured and and man and managed and specifically for the dependence on primary production we can invest into Recycling and we can invest into processing technology and that’s the the the largest largest part so let’s talk about those circularity issues if we talk about C it as here in this case from a nice graph from vly har and colleagues um we can talk about input cycling and output cycling of course with these kinds of metals we cannot Bank on ecological cycling well those geological Cycles are very very slow and therefore this will probably not work out until from a battery that we throw into the environment something magically all of a sudden once again a geological Reserve emerges that’s that will not happen so we will need to have a social ecomic cycling if we really want to reduce Supply risks then we will have to look into input cycling because we’re interested in the material that is processed it’s not about the waste and how much of that we recycle it’s a question of how much can socio economic cycling replace those materials that we need and we’ve had a look into this for a variety of metals in the periodic table to identify from those stocks throughout the economy how they um behave and I will make this very clearly for the example of aluminum so in the beginning there’s boide mining from this boide you can make an aluminum rod alloy this aluminum rod alloy might become an body and white for a car and this car is used for a while hopefully for a long time hopefully very intensively but at some point it will will become scrap now the issue with aluminum is you can’t get rid of alloying elements so therefore very often after some time this actually becomes a motor block so it becomes cast aluminum and you cannot go back you cannot make a rod aluminum out of cast aluminum because the Silicon content is way too high therefore this is a one a oneway route so it’s dead end uh and at some point you will be stuck with a lot of cast aluminum and you cannot really close the cycle overall so at some point all of these materials will be lost somehow and we wanted to quantify how long that takes how many years pass between Mining and some kind of loss can be other sorts of losses into the environment Etc or into some landfill and we did that for 61 Metals so once again these are these four big types so I put Rare Earth elements into um into the group of Specialty Metals for Ferris Metals it looks like this so you start with 1 kilogram imagine you could like flag one kilogram of iron that has been somehow magically uh mined and then all these atoms they get flaged and then you pursue them off for 200 years of course this is just a statistical uh example just the modeling what would happen for with these atoms of 1 kg of iron and Ferris element well you see after 100 years or so basically there’s just iron left and the rest is somewhat somewhat uh somewhat lost but even for iron after 200 years there’s a lot remaining and you you lose that mostly for example in Waste Management due to some thermodynamic uh losses during steel remelting Ferris Metals their steel recycling obviously is the most important uh process this is how the graph looks for Specialty Metals 100 years there’s hardly anything left and the most important ones that we lose is either already during the production so during Mining and separation from host metals or during the use phase because the materials are not collected at all there’s no waste that we could recycle so if we calculate that yes gold iron aluminum nickel copper Silver Platinum they’re fine finish of course it can still be better but basically there are maybe a few decades one or two centuries as a statistical average for half of the metals that we looked at it was 10 years or less so that would mean that we would have to mine the same amount of materials every 10 years again as a statistical average which of course is not what we would like to have it’s not it’s very far away from being cycled you could put it in in this periodic table once again and compare that for example with the Recycled content where the European commission looks at or with this end of life recycling rate so the output cycling so from the waste how much of that material is uh is cycled and all everything that is redish or yellowish that you see here that’s not what we want to have this is 10 even 10 years shows up here as yellow because it’s better than those with just one year or even shorter so that’s that’s an issue and it occures all the way throughout those Specialty Metals iron gold aluminum lead nickel copper it’s all somewhat okayish but the others are very problematic and if we come back then to the criticality assessment method it matters a lot for the European assessment because this here above this neatly looking calculation formula that’s how the EU commission calculates their supply risk assessment they multiply the factor starting from the right substitution is there a substitute or not that you can have on the market and then already the end of live recycling input rate so the input cycling socioeconomic input cycling of each metal or each critical raw material and then there’s some calculation of global or european sourcing in terms of concentration and political stability of those countries that you Source them from so this is in many wordss the most influential Factor if there is a lot of secondary raw material that available that you can have then it’s not going to be a critical raw material it’s going under the thr threshold and the highest values that the commission found was for a lad 38% that’s your car batteries they are very very well recycled copper ranium this mainly industry applications so therefore you purchase and the use catalysts in their solvent they go to a specified recycler and you get them back so it’s not a customer product tungsten zinc there’s a very nice article why exactly this 43% number is wrong it shouldn’t have been used by the European Commision actually it’s 11% it’s way worse and then zinc would have been a critical raw material but it’s not because the European commission doesn’t acknowledge that they made a made a mistake in that regard aluminum iron tin cadmium mum all of them have 30% or more in terms of input socioeconomic cycling those end of life recycling input rate and that directly reduces all the factors that they get so the question is how do we get this far end which I cut off here to higher [Applause] numbers and there Comes This vision for circularity the first thing that we need that’s typical scientific answer better data we have and Yan and colleagues have worked quite a bit on how do we match a metal production to specific applications and the European commission does that as well they use information on which sectors or which applications is a material used in in order to for example identify whether there is a substitute or not therefore they need to know where it is actually used in but we need to be more precise in that regard a metal is used for a specific material and this material then becomes part of a component and this component becomes part of a larger product and then you will use it sometimes this is very straightforward sometimes it’s very um a lengthy course where maybe there’s a component and a component and the component could be very like um multi Parts but we should be more precise in what type of a material is the used why does it matter for a component this component actually has some kind of a physical function and then it goes goes into a product where it fulfills an economic or social function and it matters for our strategies so all of these recycling or remanufacturing strategies therefore we need to identify whether this is actually a homogeneous material what is it a material that needs to be Pure or is it a material that needs to follow a very specific composition doesn’t always have to be a pure material to be high quality are these components products disassemblable so that we can separate again the different materials in the waste streams and what are the contaminating elements so for example copper in steel is an issue copper content in steel is riding in Europe and in Asia and in the US everywhere and becomes an issue for steel recycling but of course carbo contamination is not an issue for aluminum that much so we need to be very specific about what kind of material are we talking about and steel and aluminum are both used in a cars so it’s not about car copper in cars it’s copper about about copper in specific materials and you can also make this example with um batteries so lithium and Cobalt are part of a cathode active material this cathode active material is part of a battery a battery is has very very heterogeneous composition but the cathod active material has a homogeneous composition but if this lithium ion battery is used in a electric vehicle or if this lithium ion battery is used in your inar small uh microphones or headphones Apple airpods Etc then of course this is a very different question to recycle those and collect these Etc so and both of that is lith batteries so the r strategies matter how we actually model those kinds of uh materials and components and this modeling can then also be more specific so we do have these products the the the uh the production of raw materials which are then fabricated into components which are then manufactured into products then they are hopefully for a long time in the use phase so we need to make sure that this use phase uses those stocks very intensively so that we can actually reduce the amount of copper or Cobalt or lithium that we would need for all these kinds of electric car vehicle batteries of course they can be repaired then the materials need to be collected very often this is an issue because well there is no specific collection for um a variety of the smaller products and variety of materials that are in small components available and then they need to be more separated we’re working partially on that like disassembling requirements Al also in battery regulation on EU level and then they need to be recycled and in this recycling process well we would like to have information not only about how efficient is steel recycling for steel but also how efficient is steel recycling for contaminants can we get them out do they M persist in the materials one example would be that um for example zinc that we use for galvanized steel well quite a bit of that we can recycle from eaf dust so from Electric Arc furnaces the zinc goes into the dust and there we can get it back with many other materials they are much more problematic so we need to be very specific about recycling efficiencies for minor Metals which they were actually not targeted for and that of course requires like a lot of process knowledge thermodynamic modeling chemical engineering or metallurgical engineering sometimes the problem occures that these materials become of less and less quality I just mentioned co uh copper I mentioned the aluminum case as well there the materials go through this cycle and maybe for a lot of reasons the quality of the material is deteriorated materials waste are mixed with each other um alloying elements are maybe lost throughout the process and all of that increases the demand for Virgin material once again um so therefore we need to look at at aspects of down cycling and I um I would have a few examples of that um later on maybe in the discussion then if we want to do this recycling part it’s important that we have the facilities so the E commission would like to have 25% of the production capacity for strategic raw materials in Europe well what if we don’t even have primary production capacity for those materials why why should we have then recycling capacities so this will be a challenge luckily this is just a bulk parameter so they can do that with copper and then they’re done they have Define copper as a strategic raw material that makes a lot of the bulk material calculations for them easy because there they are already at 50% plus so well just just calculate that and and then we’re done but if we go into these more minor Metals I just mentioned copper here that’s an issue in in Iron recycling but what about the other metals we need lat and zinc metalogy this is a collector for a lot of um the the materials and we need to Define better Pathways there to get from one metal to the other and selectively extract those kinds of contaminations maybe that we have gotten into them unintendedly throughout our waste collection systems and we need to get them back so we will see a huge shift from parom metalogical recycling systems to hydrome metalogical systems but they need to be very specific for each of the uh uh of each of the the waste material streams and um they will need to know a lot about the information about how the wastes actually are composed because they are very selective to variances in their their composition so all parts of this metal wheel as Martin Marcus roter has has defined that um are required for a functional circular economy of metals so these types of down cycling uh effects a few examples so we already talked about nickel a little bit which is a strategic raw materials nickel for example the main issue for nickel recycling is that nickel sometimes gets diluted into carbon steel so we actually use it mostly we also use it for Batteries nowadays but we use it mostly for stainless steel and some parts of the stainless steel always gets collected with carbon Steels together and then it’s recycled as carbon steel and then nickel is basically just a filler material in carbon Steels where it doesn’t make any sense to have it there but it’s not a contaminant so it doesn’t deteriorate the material quality so we will accept that and obviously because this carbon steel production is so much larger than the stainless steel production it doesn’t matter that much metallurgically but it matters circularity wise it matters for the nickel Steel Cycle contamination we already talked about um the contamination with copper lack of demand that’s an issue with gallium for example gallium appears in my my statistics as a very shortlived material it appears as a very highly supply high Supply risk material in the EU commission assessment but only 10% of aluminum producers worldwide have a Gallum separation facility because the market is not there we could produce 10 times as much gallium from primary sources than we do gallium was produced in Germany for a long time one of the three largest producers worldwide well the Chinese got it out of the market because the prices were so low they could start it again if the prices were higher and they could recycle if the prices were higher and then the last one is design induced well sometimes thin films recycling will always be tricky so indium that’s a big issue very often in your smartphones or your laptops for thin films indium tin oxide transparent conductive material well you can’t get Indi out back from your smartphone you will not recycle that it’s just so few of the material that’s not that’s not valuable and that’s thermodynamically really complicated but that’s the main application so a checklist we need to improve our composition knowledge we need to reduce Global stock growth by using our stocks more efficiently we need to improve end of life waste collection so more separate bins yes this will be laborsome um but actually it’s it’s important to be more precise where each waste material stor goes into and if we have more homogeneous materials and more homogeneous waste streams then all of these metallurgical processes will be just so much easier we need research and development on selective recycling processes this is sometimes very difficult um to identify exactly in which order the various materials need to be um separated during hydrome metalurgical process routes we need to avoid those kinds of down cycling phenomena which will also be tricky in order to increase the recycling recyclate quality so that we can use them again and again and again so for example you make aluminum car body of an aluminum car body once again there’s a lot of research and Industry uh action in this regard currently and the last one is well what will also happen is well making primary materials more expensive so carbon taxes help because for a lot of materials they also have significant carbon emissions just as we saw if those 9% or 8% of the glob Global greenhouse gas emissions become more expensive well then there’s an automa shift towards making recyclates more economically viable so as a summary slide and I will just keep this open um we have huge environmental impacts from Metals critical raw materials should be defined as those which have high Supply Rises and high vulnerability both together um there are 32 true critical raw material currently in the EU in the EU plus nickel and Cobalt uh nickel and copper sorry which are strategic raw materials but don’t actually match the threshold for Supply risks and if we can increase the recycling content then this is very important because it’s a core measure to increase uh to decrease the supply risks in the critical raw materials act and in the EU measurement also in the US measurement you can do that uh analogically um and doing that just from this little bit of a checklist will require transdisciplinary and interdisciplinary effort because it’s a lot of there’s no Silver Bullet there’s a lot of small bits and pieces that we can work on in order to get this those numbers to higher circularity with that thank you and I’m very much looking forward to the discussion [Applause] thank you very much for the great talk I’m just moderating okay so thanks for the amazing talk I’ll be moderating the discussion so who’s Brave and has a first question to get the ball rolling yes please and oh yeah I have uh one question about maybe the connection between of the climate motivation we at the beginning about these emissions and then the circularity recycling because all of this recycling especially if you now talk about getting contaminants out of the metals sounds also very int very intense process that probably requires a lot of energy and can can lead to emissions as well is it still sort of necessarily for all of them better to go through this intense process of recycling and contaminants or do you get into a territory where for some of these Metals Maybe that’s then um yeah doesn’t have like a supply benefit but you sort of lose a lot of the climate benefit yeah so yes theoretically there is always an optimal recycling rate depending on how strongly the environmental impacts or for example energy impacts uh requirements are increasing the higher uh of a recycling rate you get so in terms of output circularity the last 10% getting from 85% to 95% recycling rate will require a lot more energy than getting from 5% to 15% obviously um because you do the easy easy Parts first um for most metals were not there for lead one could discuss that if you are already at 83% yeah increasing that to 88% or so will be labor some and will probably also VI become very problematic because we might actually use less stter batteries with electric curs or smaller ones or so so that will that market actually might change um and then other lad applications become more example more more but if as long as for example The Collection rates for these metals are so low um then we’re we’re not at that point we could calculate that and it might be very very different um there’s one more thing to keep in mind um many of the greenhouse gas emissions for primary production are not energy related for example steel a lot of the emissions comes from uh cocing coal being oxidized to carbon dioxide which is sub cing Co is a reduction agent for the production we hopefully will replace that maybe partially or fully with with hydrogen or something um similar so that you have a noncarbon based reduction agent um in aluminum case for example yeah it’s a lot of energy requirement but also there you need to do a one uh once you need to do the react uh the reduction from oxides to the metal and if as long as you keep them in the metal State and just some Alloys then the recycling will be so much less energy intensive uh therefore the the Gap that we can get is is quite large great thanks yes thank you for breaking the eyes it’s usually me who does that thank you very much for your talk I feel like it was a crash course in in these materials and was very good um I I want on the one hand to to pick up on your last point do you have an estimate uh when the Energy System becomes um based on renewable energy sources how much of the 8% would would be not an issue anymore that that is the the one part the other part I mean you as you describe it um it’s a very uh liberal understanding of we can use all kind of materials as we want them uh if you would think about in a in a different way to say is there a way of reducing the number of elements is there a way of of going into a sufficiency Direction in that field what would be the option space then yeah is there a simple solution to say are there certain areas that are not so beneficial but make a big part of the problem and there may be other parts that are less problematic but are very beneficial is something like that a kind of perspective to to look at this mhm all right so two parts of the question do the first one first so um if we decarbonize the energy system if we just take the two examples of iron and aluminum it’s a completely different answer for iron 80 to 90% of the greenhouse gas emissions is process related so if we decarbonize the uh the Energy System then yes eaf steel will be even better uh so recycled steel um but basically for primary steel not a lot changes because there most of the energy comes from maybe um some some gas natural gas that’s sometimes fueled for for in specifically in the US uh but most of the emissions come from coke and coal um for aluminum 90% of the emissions come from the energy system specifically for the electricity so if we decarbonize the electricity um there it matters a lot so if iron is 5% of the greenhous gas from the 9% that we’re looking for and aluminum is 1.5% um yeah we might not be able to do a lot with the 5% that definitely remains and uh with aluminum we might be able to reduce this 1.5% to 0.15% which is of course address quite a game changer uh for the other metals it varies quite differently quite quite separately um regarding the sufficiency question so we did one model actually takari uh was was was the lead author there um where we looked at Global metal targets metal use Targets in line with 2° C uh and we had this underlying effect or underlying assumption that all of the metals have their fair share in decarbonizing so they would also get a budget the same budget for each of the metals which of course is an assumption um and there we said as a key key result the per capita stocks that we have in high income countries would not be able to be rolled out globally even if higher if we have higher circularity Ambitions even if we have some level of green hydrogen that’s being used for steel production even if we decarbonize a little bit the aluminum sector um just the sheer amounts of materials that we use for getting all World regions to this High per capita stocks would be too much uh therefore we’d have to reduce the stocks and we would have to have much higher secondary raw material use in those uh in those circles that we have um that would be however of course every material getting the same share which I’m not a big fan of actually now now a few years after the publication because um some of these materials are very relevant for energy transition materials and energy transition Technologies so it might be very valuable to Foster these um and still use that manage the supply risks because their benefits on substituting fossil fuels elsewhere is just so High um and with electric cars that’s definitely the case so the uh benefits in terms of less fossil fuel production less oil and gas production than we have uh can I help you no I don’t think I can be helped anymore um the benefits that we have there are just so high that we should be able to manage those minor Metals with iron aluminum copper maybe that’s a different story but with the minor ones the environmental impacts are in by no means a comparison to the large decarbonization efforts because we have a question in the chat oh well that’s a pretty long one all right hello everyone online again yes great that we have people online still with us so want to read that out or yes so if we have do we have a question in the room straight away because otherwise we can is that a hand or not okay okay that’s good um so I will just thanks for the question from chat from Louis I will just read it out I would have a question regarding the supply risk indicator that is a function of the end of life recycling input rate you said that there were some down cycling issues into particular Urban deposit flows how would you improve the end of life recycling input rate factor to Encompass the potential recycled mass is there a potent poal metric that could estimate the amount of recyclable materials of a par particular deposit made of products components and materials so I guess the summary is is the potentials are they assessed to some extent so the the commission assessment looks only at let’s say the recent past so typically they do they would like to do do a fiveyear EST a fiveyear average for example for the trading data for the recent years so the 2023 assessment was based on trade data for 2016 to 2020 actually um so it’s not even very current with the recycling data we’re happy to get any number let’s be honest because getting a a global estimate for the end of life recycling input rate for say Gallum okay well there you know it’s 0% uh for zinc is really challenging simply because the markets are so different or for antim money or something like that so all these kinds of minor medals where you know it’s definitely not 0% but it’s also definitely not 60% but somewhere in between uh and you’re very happy with getting the number maybe that’s even 5 to 10 years old uh but it’s actually from a decent decent data source um that’s the European commission perspective in terms of a potential well of course yeah we could look into each of the variance materials and estimate what we as scientific or maybe industry experts say oh this is an application where we could recycle the material and we do have a recycling technology if say the collection mechanism is there uh and then do a dynamic MFA so Dynamic material flow analysis in order to estimate well how much in 10 years this secondary raw material could uh substitute those the material demand of that time at that but that’s much more laborous uh and it’s much more difficult to get it in a harmonized way for 60 plus metals or 80 raw materials as in the European commission assessment because that doesn’t look only at Metals but also at uh other materials uh and therefore this harmonization and comparability is quite important and I would say this potential recycl materials is more for like a detailed look into one of the material streams and I would probably add that these kind of Assessments only look at kind of a theoretical Lifetime and we don’t really know actual lifetimes of things for for many products yes and we always then have the problem of Economics because prices drive a lot of these developments not just like physical availability in some waste bin so absolutely I think there’s this joint problem with what does potential even mean uh yeah and I mean also with in terms of the downside down cycling issues is mentioned in that so um down cycling is also recycling but down cycling comes with a quality loss so one could say well should we devalue this quality loss a little bit and say well we could adapt our recycling statistics in that regard the EU commission only looks at recycling as long as it’s not like some some kind of back filling or something um which would then really down cycling because it’s definitely uh ter terminal terminal um but uh but anything even if it’s a low value application is still recycling any questions from the group yeah I will then return to the chat but let’s alterate a little bit you want to so for another question yob yob from PI um my I have a question you you had this like key publication on the lifetimes of the metals m and I was wondering if this is reflected anywhere also as sort of a Target because it seems it would be also interesting to look at targeting maybe getting those lifetimes up a bit but then what we saw from these EU directives it could Al with the targets they have set it would actually probably be counterproductive because if you now start increasing these lifetimes and work on measures that do that you suddenly reduce the outflows and then the Target that you’re measuring goes down so if you then look at sort of because you have less material to recycle and into these input flows so is this is this lifetime like extending the lifetime of these materials is this somehow also being addressed in as part of this policy or not sure if I got the question right okay maybe I also can you rephrase it with your we try to improve the lifetimes of products which is actually a high level strategy for suppity yes you actually decre increase end of life flows yes stuff is in use longer yeah so you might actually have less recycling happening because you have less end of life materials is is and I think the question is and now the question is how that relates to my decades or 10 years that seems the output of the research but then in the EU part on the targets we’re just focusing on this recycling so this is our Target might we do something you know counterproductive there because we’re totally ignoring this life issue um so in the EU Commission report the end of life recycling input rate is used ideally if available for the EU if not then on a global scale um if we reduce the amount of waste that we can recycle after end of life wastes we’re not talking about fabrication wastes end of life waste um there is less available so potentially this number might increase but if we extend the product lifetimes we might also decrease the amount of material that we need so therefore we might reduce the recycling but we also might reduce the full material requirements therefore this effect might not be as strong as we could imagine um ideally but of course there’s also rebound effects Etc which might be very difficult ult than to estimate beforehand but yeah that’s a potential down downside of simple to calculate um simpler to calculate as indicators sure but I would say I would add that the use of an input recycling rate is actually a really good move in here I’m I’m was very positively surprised because that opens up a lot of options isn’t it if you decrease demand you basically automatically increase input recycling so there is different ways of looking at that you see there there clearly that the criticality assessments is an exercise on the EU level is an exercise done by DJ grow so by the so to speak economy Ministry um so it’s not from the DG environment so therefore this is clear that they look at how can we make sure that the European economy gets the raw materials that that it desires it’s not a waste regulation um I’m not going to say about which material it was but during one of the discussions it was quite interesting um that they said oh this material now all of a sudden becomes a critical raw material prepare for a backlash from DG environment because it was a toxic material that all of a sudden is economically very important so therefore well there’s some conflicts in between different Ministries uh yeah from Anu uh thanks for a very interesting presentation of course i’ I’ve followed the debate for almost two decades uh it’s quite interesting to see how it has developed I think this initially the concern about critical raw materials was came from Asia right the ja Japan I I think uh which generally doesn’t have Minds right and there therefore a big problem with depending on on external resources for everything but Al also China early on sort of recognized the importance and and acted strategically to secure its own Supply uh and now we are sort of a late Comer to the game I I feel very much that that that that’s the case and what you describe I feel like there is uh these two strategic and critical material definitions you have one sort of schematic process which is scientific or pseudo scientific and then you have a more political process where Industries say what is strategically important for them right and then we define specific Industries as strategic in their products and uh and so the interesting thing is that this more schematic assessment is is based on static information right it’s based on information in a specific point in time where is a lot of the components of the more like political process IA oh we we need to make more batteries right they become a much more important part of our economy therefore we need to secure the supply of the resources we need for those batteries so so there is actually in some way there real value I think to to this more strategic or or political process and that that is interesting to see actually so uh just a a comment from my side uh and I wonder how you have you looked at this like the future demand for for the energy transition these questions where we say well you know we need we need more EVS we’ll need more solar panels and L LED lamps and stuff like that what are the materials that we need for that yeah so cuz I I talked a lot about the the the political way of doing criticality assessments yes there’s a scientific paper behind that that basically describes how the the process works on it from uh binia and colleagues from 2017 ever since then the method hasn’t really changed um but there’s also other scientific approaches towards doing Supply risk assessments specifically those um for example we looked a lot into Supply risk assessment for Energy Technologies um I had I looked at lithium batteries how that changes from one material to the other uh we looked at thin film photo voltaics whether this actually matters between the various discussed uh Technologies and more recently we already published a a paper on um photochemical photoelectric chemical water splitting so alternative ways of producing green hydrogen uh artificial Leaf more or less um and there we specifically also said okay well uh this is a techn techology that’s definitely not Market ready uh so there will be quite a quite some time to develop that so we need to use indicators that are much more future oriented so we work with in for example reserves instead of uh actual production data in this future perspective and then put this uh in comparison um and there’s other assessments as well where for example the future technology deband plays a much more uh higher much higher role in terms of quantifying whether there’s actually a supply demand Gap I mean because there’s always two part right you can have a supply demand Gap if the supply reduces but you can also have a supply demand Gap if the demand all of a sudden increases and you can’t keep up with that so therefore there are alternatives to that uh I share your uh view that this current assessment of the EU is very um yeah recent past so to speak uh oriented and not very future oriented whereas the Strategic at least has some uh components of that um one more note you said 20 years uh there’s actually some very interesting reports and papers out there which go very far into the past and which have a very similar notion and very similar wording and they also talk about strategic minerals they also talk about critical criticality sometimes even uh of materials uh that are from the ‘ 50s or from the ‘ 70s all of a sudden where you see we’ve had this discussion before for example but you can imagine in the 50s this discussion was much less about China and much more about Russia or the Soviet Union okay yes yeah you had this one graph showing the life cycle of a metal are consisting of different process stages manufacturing stages and what I’m specifically interesting are those is are those losses so each manufact in processes has been uh consisting of losses as well and what is meant by those losses are those just quality losses or are those losses that somehow are going into the nature into ecosystems and this would also be my second question uh we have discussed the greenhouse gas effects and how they contribute to uh climate change but what about pollution can you probably say something about pollution Also regarding to upcoming Technologies future Technologies what is what is their contribution to pollution yeah MH MH MH mhh um all right so the first one we have this in this model we have this very simplified way of looking at production fabrication manufacturing use phase Waste Management collection and then actually the recycling process so very aggregated and there we put this loss Factory in there depending on which metal you look at these losses are either irrelevant they’re less than one way less than 1% or something or they are highly relevant so make one example gallium once again if only 10% of Gallum producers have a Gallum separation facility Well where does it end up option one it ends up in the aluminum no it doesn’t or it ends UPS in in the red mud yeah it does so you you do have Gallum concentration still in orders of PPM um concentration in red mud which is a byproduct waste material occurring during aluminum processing very generally speaking and it’s a waste material that needs to be dumped somewhere so you will never touch this again and you will not get Gallum back from that and it’s into the environment that’s definitely a loss and it’s a huge loss in terms of Gallum um but there’s also aspects of for example if iron is smelted there’s not a lot of plus there’s this is highly efficient process huge volumes not a lot of surface uh processes and so on so once this iron actually enters pig iron stage and becomes steel there’s not a lot of processing waste for that of course we do have also these metals like element which have huge cutting rests so processing and Fabrication waste that get remelted right away so we also had this factor of processing waste that can be recycled at high quality uh which always the aluminum industry uses to increase their inflow uh or input cycling uh rates and say oh we we’re so good we have so much recycled material yet you produce that waste the first and then you recycle it it never actually touched any use phase so please don’t calculate that but the of course it’s nice to to to tweak your statistics in that regard um and there’s last example um I already talked about indium so if you have these thin films for indium tin oxide you can imagine how that process works like it’s actually a um it’s a process that works with indium sputtering onto this target more or less so it’s you have a lot of losses onto the atmosphere around that product that gets highly recycled but of course it’s also a highly inefficient inherently highly inefficient process so therefore there will be quite a bit of losses and that is actually a high high uh high source for indium contamination somewhere else um so this is one L so you see depends quite a bit on which material you look at regarding the environmental question um sorry can I just jump in one thing you didn’t mention which is losses by Design M so the use phase I guess my my my my typical example is titanium so um the the the most frequent use for titanium is white paint titanium dioxide you will not recycle white paint because this is construction waste in the end at some point you will not scratch this from the wall and get it back uh titanium dioxide is also in uh sun protection yeah you will not get the titanium deide out of the ocean again no probably not uh so therefore there are inherent dissipative uses which for some metals are quite relevant of course if you have a um Titanium um medical device in your body well that can be recovered after the use face yeah there is also stuff like brake pads oh yeah is it yeah there’s variety of every bike has a brake pad these are metals and by definition they are dissipated because you know you break so you always lose material and there is also I talked to people who looked at all kinds of medical applications so for example if you do X-rays and things like that sometimes you have to take this liquid to increase the contrast metal contract agent yeah that’s not really recycled it goes down the drain so I think if you look around you will find a lot of examples where kind of small losses occur which in the end lead to a loss of overall losses a lot of overall losses yeah and that of course brings me then to the environmental question because there we then have to look into okay so do those elements matter if we emit them into the environment are they potentially toxic well we have reach and rs restrictions where we look partially in in terms of do are they toxic during use but we also look into are they potentially toxic for the environment um so chem basically that’s that’s a chemist uh chemical registration um issue um and we would like to look more into um like safe and sustainable by Design I think this is a nice overall concept brought up uh so that in theory only uh chemicals that are um that are safe for the environment will will be actually uh allowed to be produced in large quantities by the industry from the past we have seen that sometimes we just know that 20 years too late um that it has been a problem and of course with with all this past problems for example uh this will be quite challenging for the industry but there have been examples in the past where also the industry said well this will be terrible difficulty to replace and then all of a sudden 10 years later there’s a solution so let’s find uh some creativity in that regard as well uh most of the metals in many regards if they are meted to the environment are non-toxic and not problematic so um therefore uh they are then also probably not that much of a problem yeah yeah my name is Hans pet vand uh with Dominic and I have I have actually three questions yeah but but Dominic you might have to help me then but two short one and one I don’t know but the first thing is actually an observation I don’t know if I saw it correctly when you showed these strategic sectors that least I think the military was not part of it right you should there were some robots some drones things there’s there’s AOS space and defense is sometimes uh so it’s hidden between those those items even things for for jet engines Al so then it might be very relevant I was just wondering tanks typically don’t show up yeah so that was the the second one is uh I was thinking so what is your opinion on the uh possibilities or the options of uh dig digitalization for recycling so I mean those the problem of the collection and sorting and things like that and we have now this new tools I would say like tracking things uh things internet of the things or what is it called you know like like all these new uh technology that’s out there I mean there are must be some uh ideas how to use that to uh manage the collection and sorting yeah I’ll be able to answer that okay yeah exactly this and the second question was because you always well I mean the Target or what what is the goal like increasing the recycling rate and extending the lifetime and things like that I think that’s pretty that’s pretty clear so what is the goal right so I mean it’s complicated still yeah but the question then is how to how what to do to reach that goal I mean from the perspective of uh let’s call it a policy maker yeah so I mean we talk about the European Union we talk about the national level the all this different levels so what can these decision makers actually do and you just mentioned taxes right that was that was I’ve heard so you said the carbon tax so because then it’s more expensive the primary and so but I was thinking is that is there more is there more yeah because I think actually it’s by changing the prices you try to change the market for these products and I think there must be more options to change the market than to the prices right so these are my questions okay thanks uh so I think the first one we already covered um so the second one second question um digitalization two parts first part is sorting and separation Technologies it’s amazing what’s nowadays possible with high throughput sensors um partially also uh visual uh detection so one example um by now you can put aluminum scrap uh through a process you put multiple cameras on it multiple lasers you smelt the surface very briefly you do an x-ray analysis of what this with this alloy is you need to smelt the surface very briefly because aluminum has a lot of surface uh effects so you don’t want to actually measure the surface you want to go a little bit below that uh and then you identify what kind of alloy it is uh and because probably the alloy is homogeneous within so from one measurement you can you can be fine uh in terms of the composition of the material and then you identify okay this has magnesium in it it’s got copper in it it’s got this in it mostly so there’s variety of sorting options that you have and you can just then do bits and pieces out of that and you can do that in life with high volumes this is amazing uh this was not possible 10 years ago um so you would have to guess and do some or do edic currens and that kind of things so that wasn’t very efficient in in terms of Separation so it was more uh more like we know where the script comes from and therefore this is probably this alloy we will sort it this way uh nowadays you can be through digitalization and sensors and high throughput you can be more efficient in that regard second part is product passports so uh sometimes maybe even we will be able to identify exactly what the composition of this product is if there is a digital product passport uh and there will be a lot of digital product passports if the legislation goes through we do now have a battery passport as like the pre the the Earth first version so the EU battery regulation mandates that every battery that’s put on the European market needs to have a battery passport and that battery passport needs to State what kind of cathode active material is in there what’s the carbon footprint also of this battery um and uh how can this product be dismantled and these kind of things so therefore also waste the waste sector gets a lot of information without any measurements so then you can be sure oh this was with this battery produced six years ago from this producer and I will put them together with all others from this producer and that’s fine and you all you get this information just from reading the QR code that’s printed uh for a long period of time on the product as long as that’s not damaged that’s going to be fine um so these two options that we have and with uh um these kinds of um environmental footprint regulations Eco design directives which now go much more from Energy Efficiency to carbon footprint efficiency we will probably see much more product groups where these battery uh where these product Footprints and product uh passports will be mandatory so that covers the second question oh hopefully third question just just just just the keyword prices yes thanks H more more options than price um also there battery regulation is pretty neat so the battery regulation mandates that producers that put a battery on the market on the European market need to show that for four materials lithium Cobalt nickel and Lead they fulfill a minimum requirement of secondary materials there unfortunately fabrication waste is still okay unfort so this is imperfect but there is a minimum requirement if you’re under that you cannot put it on the European market if it’s actually lived that way uh but that’s Cur law and it’s enforc so that was accepted so in a few years after some transition period this will be mandatory even if it’s a Chinese battery even if it’s an us battery coming from the inflation reduction act uh they will have to show that they have for lithium 12% recycled material now come the this the the systems perspective once again we don’t actually know if those 12% material are available on the market if everyone would have to fulfill that with this drastically increasing demand it might not be possible to actually recycle as much material uh to get to those 12% for all products that are put on the European market um in those cases maybe then the ambition level will might might go down but that’s currently the ambition level you need to fulfill ever increasing recycling rates so this is a by Green reg regulation which is not Market based which is not tax based it’s just you have to fulfill this um the second large one very similar to that is by saying oh this product needs to be below this carbon footprint and most producers currently go that way uh well we can’t actually further decarbonize because we have already purchased green as electricity everywhere and we don’t use natural gas anymore so all of our footprint is scope three from materials that we scope so we mandate that our supplier gives us a product which has 80% recycled material all of this needs to be green Steel Etc um and currently the suppliers say yeah we will do that uh we’ll be tricky to follow up on that and there will be a lot of lawsuits where this will not be fulfilled but this is also carbon Taxation and carbon foot printing um mandating that the carbon footprint needs to be lower than a specific threshold will mean that this the OEM will look much more into is my material also green and recycled materials are typically much lower come come with a much lower carbon foent than primary materials so this will be a lever okay um hi Kristoff thanks um I have basically a follow-up question maybe to H second question so we talked a lot about technological options for increasing the duration the lifetime of metal elements staying in in the anthropogenic cycles and I was wondering what’s the the human dimension in there so like for instance now in these losses in collection um and so on like is there a substantial contribution from losses through human behavior for instance just throwing trash away or keeping the smartphones in the drawer and then um also um could this be um like a lever in the future to for instance have Les less tax on labor to kind of yeah then have more people cheaply repairing stuff and maybe even with a laser scanner like disassembling products to even better recyclable something that machines cannot do at the moment yeah H all right um yes there is a human component specifically for electronics so for Consumer Electronics consumer electronics don’t belong into the waste bin interior household waste Municipal Solid Waste ever full stop no matter how large the product is unless maybe it’s some kind of medical device okay then it might be something more tricky but it doesn’t belong in there and it’s um for Consumer Electronics it’s partially a human partially a societal U um challenge to organize then the the takeback mechanisms uh through other ways because it simply doesn’t belong into that part because the materials will typically be lost because if you incinerate that once well that doesn’t work and sorting of materials well before waste ination that typically doesn’t work so because we basically put all our Municipal Solid Waste through waste incineration in Central Europe therefore this is quite a bit of a challenge to get people to actually really do that um smartphones in your drawer from the statistics that I have not that much of an issue anymore yes it has been a problem but now with these takeback mechanisms and you get a lot of deducts if you actually send back your phone and smartphone use times having increased actually from about 3 years on average to about four and a half years on average now uh people actually use their phones longer so apparently there has been some shift um therefore this apparently not that much of an issue anymore um and last part of that question was uh uh well this could be like a lever in the future to you know have like more people have jobs in repair the repairing yes yes um I probably can’t answer this question properly because yeah there’s this typical answer of like yeah well if you TX work less then people will have more efforts in that but I don’t have any data on that I’m n just not working on how people actually work in terms of so as soon as humans come into play not machines then typically my my job [Laughter] stopped most of these metals are recycled that’s also an important part to know when to not uh answer anymore or where your expertise ends uh so we have one last question in the chat before I would like to close uh which is how substitution and reduction decisions on the demand side could affect specific metals and the critical raw materials landscape in general so I would think this is about how much can we do regarding demand side measures but as also substitution yeah demand side measur we talked about it today a little bit from Tom gradle’s work that some demand side measur is tricky um substitution measures and efforts a lot because if if there’s a substitute available in practice it changes the market drastically so there’s a side story once again on the battery side so apparently the catl boss the CEO of catl which is largest battery producer in the world Chinese company has said in a meeting that they invented lfp batteries just because they were rid of their suppliers giving them higher prices every year so just the availability that there are lfp batteries available that don’t use nickel that don’t use Cobalt in there has reduced nickel and Cobalt prices by a factor of five now lfp B batteries are not competitive anymore because lithiumion batteries are also cheap once again but I mean they do have a second option still on the market and they can always say well if you rise if you raise the prices again we will just go back to the lfp because we have it now fully developed so we do actually have something to negoti iate with and that also of course means that um this is highly flexible in terms of well if if really lithium would become oh well lithium is the wrong example because all of these lithium ion batteries require lithium uh if really um um there’s a nickel shortage or a Cobalt shortage the market can now shift away to lfp batteries so therefore also well it’s not that you’re only relyant on chines Cobalt oh you might just use Chinese phosphate instead but of course then regarding the single material you’re less Reliant uh and you’re this material is less less critical okay thank you very much if there is no further pressing questions I would like to end with a round of applause for the great talk