At Umicore, critical raw materials (CRMs) are a key part of our business. Our work in essential sectors such as energy and batteries, automotive and mobility, aerospace, electronics and communications, all depend on the unique properties of different CRMs.
It’s these special characteristics that make CRMs such a hot topic in today’s global trade and geopolitics. Nations have always competed for access to natural resources such as agricultural land, water or fossil fuels, but now the spotlight is shifting to the critical raw materials that underpin the technologies on which our modern lives rely.
But what are critical raw materials? And why are they so important?
Making the world go round
As you read this article, there’s a good chance that CRMs are helping you. That’s because laptops, smartphones and other everyday electronics rely heavily on materials such as gold, silver and germanium for, semiconductors, displays and more. The same goes for electric vehicles and battery-based infrastructure, which are key to the energy transition, using CRMs like nickel, cobalt and lithium. Other CRMs, like the Platinum Group Metals (PGMs) – platinum, palladium and rhodium – are essential for the catalytic convertor in your car, medical instruments and jewellery. Copper is essential for the wiring in your home and the electricity grid, while phosphate-based fertilisers are essential to producing the food on your plate.
As Wouter Ghyoot, Vice President of Government Affairs at Umicore, says: “Whether it’s a material like germanium that powers the satellites that orbit in space or the lithium, cobalt and nickel in the battery of your electric car, CRMs are the secret ingredients that make the magic happen.’’
With such a wide range of essential applications, many of which are intrinsic to the green transition and digitalisation, it’s easy to see why CRMs are in booming demand. However, they are also in scarce supply, with the largest deposits of many CRMs found in relatively few countries. For example, around 70% of cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo, 66% of platinum reserves are in South Africa and 50% of global lithium reserves are in the ‘lithium triangle’ of Chile, Argentina and Bolivia. China controls around 70% of rare earth mining and 90% of processing. Rare earth elements, such as neodymium and dysprosium, have unique magnetic properties, used in computer hard drives and headphones, for example.
A stronger European supply chain
As a reflection of this strategic importance, particularly where they support the sustainability and digitalisation agenda, the EU officially lists 34 CRMs. Of these, 17 are designated as ‘Strategic Raw Materials’, with the highest supply risk and most demand. These include lithium, cobalt, PGMs and germanium – all of which are foundational for the infrastructure Europe needs to meet its 2030 and 2050 climate goals. With demand set to soar – for lithium alone, this could leap by 3,500% by 2050 – and recent geopolitical crises emphasising the risks of overdependency on any one country, it’s clear Europe needs to build a resilient CRM supply chain.
Circularity can play an important role in mitigating CRM supply risk. As many are metal based materials, they can be efficiently and infinitely recycled and with Umicore being a global leader in precious metals refining with its one of a kind recycling process, it has valuable expertise to offer. As Wouter Ghyoot says:
“We have a huge opportunity here in Europe to gain more control over our CRM supply. Closed loop systems for CRM recycling – for example with end-of-life EV batteries – create a significant supply of battery metals that can stay in Europe. Think of the huge numbers of EVs driving on Europe’s roads – that’s a dynamic and high-volume stock of CRMs that can eventually be recycled.’’
Wouter says this model is already seen with combustion-engine vehicles, as the expensive and precious PGMs used in catalytic convertors are being recovered and reused. “In Europe demand for PGMs is already coming from recycling because you've got a very large stock of catalysts in tens of millions of combustion engines. It will take longer for EV batteries to produce the same proportion of recycled material, because the cars are newer, but the pipeline is there and growing all the time.’’
The EU recognises the strategic advantage offered here: its Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) includes a target of acquiring 25% of its critical raw materials from recycled sources by 2030. Eurometaux translates this into a +10% increase in recycling’s supply contribution, per material wherever feasible, by 2030.
How Umicore fits into the picture
Umicore’s experience and expertise give us the credibility to be at the forefront of the CRM circular economy, helping to strengthen the continent’s CRM supply chain.
Our precious metals refining plant in Belgium is unique in that it can recycle and refine 17 of the 34 critical raw materials listed. And our battery recycling technology is also the first-of-its-kind to recover lithium at industrial scale and can achieve recovery yields of over 95% for cobalt, copper, and nickel and over 90% for lithium.
Through these processes, Umicore can make CRMs more available to manufacturers, enabling them to build the electric vehicle batteries, solar panels, and fibre optic cables, for example, that power our high-tech economies and drive the energy transition. When these products come to the end of their life, Umicore can save their materials from going to waste and close the materials loop. Crucially, though, we’re not the sole European actor and we rely on EU policymaking to support our mission. You can read here what we believe needs to happen to enable a Single Market for the circular economy.
