Viability of EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act
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A landmark ruling that will strengthen the union’s supply chains for decades to come
Published: April 2024
In April 2024, the EU passed the Critical Raw Materials Act (“CRMA”) into law in a landmark accomplishment that will strengthen the union’s critical raw materials supply chains for decades to come, albeit not without some foreseeable challenges.
For strategic raw materials – a subset of critical raw materials deemed “crucial” to strategic technologies – the CRMA mandates that 10% of the EU’s annual consumption must be mined domestically, 40% must be processed domestically, and 25% of all processing waste and end-of-life scrap must be recycled domestically by 2030. Furthermore, the EU may not source over 65% of any SRM from a single nation.
![Screenshot 2024 04 23 111650](https://www.adamasintel.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Screenshot-2024-04-23-111650.png)
Despite the CRMA’s applicability to strategic raw materials broadly, a detailed review of the act reveals a disproportionately high focus on raw materials used to produce rare earth permanent magnets, such as neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium, as well as battery-grade lithium used to produce batteries.
Industry experts at Adamas Intelligence, Tradium and Rawmaterials.net carried out a detailed review of the CRMA and co-authored a report examining the implications and viability of mandated targets for lithium and rare earth elements while highlighting potential challenges, opportunities and recommendations policymakers and industry stakeholders should be aware of.
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“The outlook for REEs in the context of the CRMA is more concerning, with the region unlikely to meet 2030 extraction or processing targets across the value chain without an expedited, concerted push from government and industry”Report authors
“Furthermore, without sufficient end-to-end processing capacity in the region, the EU may be constrained in its ability to recover rare earths from magnet production swarf and EOL devices, if first it can overcome challenges related to sourcing and centralizing feedstocks”Report authors