Critical raw materials (CRM) are raw materials that are in short supply worldwide. It would stand to reason that the critical raw materials would also be recycled. But this is not the case; the recycling rate for many of these raw materials is currently close to zero, experts have told Leonie Düngefeld. The European Commission has promised improvement: In March, it plans to unveil the Critical Raw Materials Act. The goal is to recover at least 20 percent of the rare earths contained in waste streams by 2030. At this week’s Raw Materials Week in Brussels, recycling was praised as the best solution – although the industry is not yet ready, it is said.
The Digital Markets Act is already being implemented. In late summer 2023, it will become clear which companies and their services will fall under the DMA, as Till Hoppe reports. The rules are basically clear: For example, a service must have at least 45 million monthly active users within the EU on a permanent basis. But in addition to established candidates like Apple and Google, there will also be companies that will try to minimize their market calculations and make their market power appear smaller than it actually is.
The conflict between the EU and Hungary may be entering the final phase. MEPs from all political groups are demanding that the EU Commission investigate Hungary’s measures against corruption in the country. The Commission is supposed to withhold €7.5 billion in EU funds until the promised measures have been implemented.
At the end of March, the European Commission will present its proposal for a Critical Raw Materials Act. The aim is to establish and strengthen European value chains for strategically important raw materials. An important pillar of the legislative package is to be the establishment of a raw materials circular economy.
During Raw Materials Week, a conference in Brussels hosted by the Commission and industry partners, Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton stressed that the legislative proposal should also include concrete targets for recycling critical raw materials. In a LinkedIn post back in September, he had cited as an example the goal to recover “at least 20% of the rare earth elements present in relevant waste streams by 2030.”
A study presented at the event by KU Leuven on behalf of Eurometaux, the association of the European non-ferrous metals industry, also concludes that “recycling is Europe’s most important opportunity to strengthen its long-term self-sufficiency. By 2050, it could supply 45 to 65 percent of Europe’s base metal needs, and as much as 77 percent of battery metals, and even provide a surplus of rare earths. Europe’s clean energy system will rely on durable metals that can be maintained indefinitely in a circular economy,” the report says.
But what about the near future? Recycling does have an important role to play in securing raw material supplies, said Kerstin Jorna, director general of DG Grow. “In the short and medium term, however, we will continue to need primary raw materials.” The KU Leuven study cites a 20-year period in which new primary materials will be crucial to Europe’s energy transition. This is mainly due to the exploding demand for lithium, aluminum, rare earths and other raw materials. However, there is another reason: The recycling industry in Europe for the minerals and metals concerned is still in its infancy.
“For the vast majority of so-called critical raw materials, recycling rates are extremely low. You could say almost zero,” says Jens Gutzmer, director of the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology. Yet at least half of these minerals and metals have been on the list of critical raw materials for the EU for more than a decade. “We haven’t managed to build a recycling value chain for any of these critical raw materials that would have a significant impact now to relieve the primary raw material base.”
According to the raw materials researcher, however, this is not due to a lack of ideas, funds or laboratory experiments. Rather, the last step is the problem: scaling up the experiments to industrial operation. So far, this has not worked in Germany or elsewhere in Europe; the risk inherent in the necessary investments is simply too great for the private sector, explains Gutzmer.
“Establishing a circular economy for many of the technology feedstocks would require an initial investment, similar to what renewable energy has seen.” Setting up an industry for solar and wind energy was also not economically viable at first, he said. Here, he explained, the government had made sure it could develop by intervening in the market.
In China, he says, such strategic subsidies have long been common. “We would have to accept that in Europe as well, that we have to get the industry going first to overcome this hurdle,” says Gutzmer. This would make it possible to make a much greater contribution to recycling in the case of high-tech metals.
Even when recycling processes are then ramped up to industrial scale, the available material is another problem: The products concerned usually have long lifetimes; the battery of an electric vehicle, for example, can only be recycled after about 15 years.
In countries like China, where there was a market and larger production capacities for lithium-ion cells much earlier, the recycling industry was also ramped up more quickly. In a sense, companies there could already test and optimize recycling processes with production scrap and shortages (Europe.Table reported).
That is why it is important to ensure that secondary raw materials are not exported but remain part of the domestic raw material base, says Paolo Cerruti, COO of battery manufacturer Northvolt. He calls for a ban on exports of recyclable materials. “We need to keep our own materials within our borders,” he said in Brussels this week.
Instead of focusing too much on recycling, policymakers and industry also need to drive other circular economy strategies on a large scale. This is the conclusion of a new study by sustainability consultancy Systemiq with the support of the European Climate Foundation (Europe.Table reported). This includes, for example, promoting car-sharing services, reducing the use of certain raw materials, and keeping products and materials in use for longer.
Various non-governmental organizations have long been calling for binding targets for a reduction in the consumption of primary raw materials. What was possible for limiting CO₂ emissions must also be achieved for the consumption of raw materials and goods, an activist told Europe.Table. The Commission had shown itself open to this idea – but did not want to formulate such targets in the current mandate.
Things won’t get really serious until early May, when the Digital Markets Act takes effect. Informally, however, the EU Commission and the major digital companies are already talking about the new rules, which are intended to limit the market power of the corporations. So far, the contacts have been quite constructive, according to Brussels: “But there is still fighting over the points that could potentially hurt the companies.”
First of all, there is the question of which companies and which of their services fall under the DMA at all. The regulations contain clear thresholds for the so-called gatekeepers – for example, a service must have at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU on a permanent basis. The legal text also lists the types of services to which the DMA’s conduct requirements apply, such as search engines, social networks and app stores.
But not all cases are as clear-cut as Google’s online search or Apple’s App Store. In borderline cases, companies could try to stay below the thresholds by defining the market in their own terms – the Commission does not even want to get involved in such discussions. In addition, there are cases such as Microsoft’s search engine Bing, where the thresholds for user numbers, revenue and stock market value may be reached, but the providers still have little market power. Additionally, the DMA also provides for the softer category of “emerging gatekeepers” that have not yet quite reached the quantitative values.
Who will fall under the DMA will therefore not be known until late summer of next year. After the launch on May 2, companies will have two months to notify the Commission of their services if they meet the criteria. The authority then has 45 working days to classify a company as a gatekeeper and thus bind it to the numerous rules and regulations in articles 5 and 6 of the DMA. The companies can still appeal against this. The Commission is prepared for this to happen, at least in borderline cases.
The authority does not intend to tackle the decision in the less clear-cut cases of whether a company falls into the gatekeeper category until a second wave, partly in order to better distribute the initially high workload. 80 positions are earmarked for supervision at the authority, partly through internal shifts and partly through new jobs in the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. In addition, around 60 experts will be recruited at Connect and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), which is part of the Commission, in order to implement the Digital Services Act, which will come into force at the same time. The Commission plans to make further additions next year when the revenues from the supervisory fee that the groups concerned have to pay start flowing in.
The teams in the new unit are not to be aligned with individual gatekeepers – so there will be no Team Apple or Team Amazon. Rather, experts from each of the two directorates general are to deal thematically with the individual platform services and the behavioral guidelines tailored to them.
DG Connect officials will also ensure that insights from analyses of major platforms are incorporated under the DSA, for example on online advertising. The new unit at Connect will be headed by Filomena Chirico, who was previously responsible for the DMA in the cabinet of Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton. Also responsible for DMA and DSA will be the new Deputy Director General Renate Nikolay, previously Head of Cabinet of Vice President Věra Jourová.
The experts’ task will be to monitor compliance with the obligations in the DMA. Once they have been assigned as gatekeepers, the companies have six months to implement the necessary technical and organizational changes. In a compliance report, they must explain to the Commission how they now intend to meet the requirements.
The authority can then demand specific improvements, if necessary after consultation with other market participants. Stakeholders are also to be involved in advance: For example, the Commission is planning a workshop for Dec. 5 to discuss how the ban on gatekeepers giving preference to their own offers can be implemented in practice.
In some cases, the companies have already anticipated the changes: For example, Google announced that developers of apps for the Play Store could now offer their European users other payment systems than the one provided by Google. This corresponds to one of the requirements from the DMA, which is aimed at app stores.
Unlike the DSA, the national authorities in the member states play only a minor role in enforcing the new rules. The Commission was established as the “sole enforcer” in the DMA. The national competition authorities can only assist it, for example by receiving complaints. Under the current 11th amendment to the ARC, the German Federal Cartel Office is also to be given the right to investigate possible violations of the DMA. It will then report its findings to the Commission.
The Federal Cartel Office will also have much less scope to take action against the digital groups itself on the basis of German competition law. For practices covered by the DMA, “there will no longer be any need for intervention on the basis of competition law,” says a spokesperson for the Bonn-based authority. However, as far as combinations of services and practices not covered by the DMA are concerned, prohibitions on the basis of Section 19a of the ARC are still possible.
Following the introduction of the new Section 19a in the ARC at the beginning of 2021, the Federal Cartel Office has already initiated a number of proceedings against the digital groups – most recently against Amazon. The extent to which the authority will press ahead with these cases will now be coordinated with the Commission, according to the spokesperson. Here, “it must be clarified on a case-by-case basis, if necessary, to what extent the subjects of ongoing proceedings fall under the DMA”.
“She only eats grains!” In a country where people argue over whether eating (a lot of) meat and machismo go hand in hand, the Prime Minister’s culinary habits have not been spared the polemic. When accused by a government advisor of eating “only grains” over the summer, the prime minister responded a few days later in Elle magazine, “Honestly, I’m pretty hardened by my professional background. But when I see articles attacking my alleged eating habits, I believe I must be dreaming. This is an incredible form of sexism,” she outraged in the magazine.
With that, she showed that she would not be bullied. Since her appointment as Prime Minister by Emmanuel Macron in May this year, she is no longer the gray and bland technician many saw her as, but also a woman who knows how to attack.
The woman referred to as “Borne-out” or “Darth Vader” in the corridors of Parisian power has a reputation as a workhorse known for wearing down her staff. What is her method? “I’ve been an engineer, a prefect and an entrepreneur. I believe in results, not labels,” she said.
She also recalled that she has experience with difficult negotiations and explosive reforms (such as the reform of the SNCF and unemployment insurance under the previous five-year period) and that she can “deliver”.
And she who is considered so stiff, in a very rare moment of openness about her private life, also spoke about the drama of her childhood: the suicide of her father when she was 11, who was a Jewish resistance fighter who was deported to Auschwitz. Elisabeth Borne seeks political compromise – which is rare enough in France – and therefore exhibits qualities far more “Scholz-compatible” than the flamboyance that the French president can display.
In France, however, this is also the nature of the Prime Minister’s mandate: the French head of government is the number two in the state. Appointed by the President of the Republic, the occupant of the Hôtel Matignon in particular holds some executive power and directs the work of the government. But not only that. According to the theory of “safeguarding,” the French Prime Minister takes the blows for the president. Therefore, in the coming week, Elisabeth Borne sees it as her duty to ease the tensions that are currently running high between Paris and Berlin. If she succeeds, Emmanuel Macron will benefit. If she fails, the blame will be hers alone.
Critical raw materials (CRM) are raw materials that are in short supply worldwide. It would stand to reason that the critical raw materials would also be recycled. But this is not the case; the recycling rate for many of these raw materials is currently close to zero, experts have told Leonie Düngefeld. The European Commission has promised improvement: In March, it plans to unveil the Critical Raw Materials Act. The goal is to recover at least 20 percent of the rare earths contained in waste streams by 2030. At this week’s Raw Materials Week in Brussels, recycling was praised as the best solution – although the industry is not yet ready, it is said.
The Digital Markets Act is already being implemented. In late summer 2023, it will become clear which companies and their services will fall under the DMA, as Till Hoppe reports. The rules are basically clear: For example, a service must have at least 45 million monthly active users within the EU on a permanent basis. But in addition to established candidates like Apple and Google, there will also be companies that will try to minimize their market calculations and make their market power appear smaller than it actually is.
The conflict between the EU and Hungary may be entering the final phase. MEPs from all political groups are demanding that the EU Commission investigate Hungary’s measures against corruption in the country. The Commission is supposed to withhold €7.5 billion in EU funds until the promised measures have been implemented.
At the end of March, the European Commission will present its proposal for a Critical Raw Materials Act. The aim is to establish and strengthen European value chains for strategically important raw materials. An important pillar of the legislative package is to be the establishment of a raw materials circular economy.
During Raw Materials Week, a conference in Brussels hosted by the Commission and industry partners, Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton stressed that the legislative proposal should also include concrete targets for recycling critical raw materials. In a LinkedIn post back in September, he had cited as an example the goal to recover “at least 20% of the rare earth elements present in relevant waste streams by 2030.”
A study presented at the event by KU Leuven on behalf of Eurometaux, the association of the European non-ferrous metals industry, also concludes that “recycling is Europe’s most important opportunity to strengthen its long-term self-sufficiency. By 2050, it could supply 45 to 65 percent of Europe’s base metal needs, and as much as 77 percent of battery metals, and even provide a surplus of rare earths. Europe’s clean energy system will rely on durable metals that can be maintained indefinitely in a circular economy,” the report says.
But what about the near future? Recycling does have an important role to play in securing raw material supplies, said Kerstin Jorna, director general of DG Grow. “In the short and medium term, however, we will continue to need primary raw materials.” The KU Leuven study cites a 20-year period in which new primary materials will be crucial to Europe’s energy transition. This is mainly due to the exploding demand for lithium, aluminum, rare earths and other raw materials. However, there is another reason: The recycling industry in Europe for the minerals and metals concerned is still in its infancy.
“For the vast majority of so-called critical raw materials, recycling rates are extremely low. You could say almost zero,” says Jens Gutzmer, director of the Helmholtz Institute Freiberg for Resource Technology. Yet at least half of these minerals and metals have been on the list of critical raw materials for the EU for more than a decade. “We haven’t managed to build a recycling value chain for any of these critical raw materials that would have a significant impact now to relieve the primary raw material base.”
According to the raw materials researcher, however, this is not due to a lack of ideas, funds or laboratory experiments. Rather, the last step is the problem: scaling up the experiments to industrial operation. So far, this has not worked in Germany or elsewhere in Europe; the risk inherent in the necessary investments is simply too great for the private sector, explains Gutzmer.
“Establishing a circular economy for many of the technology feedstocks would require an initial investment, similar to what renewable energy has seen.” Setting up an industry for solar and wind energy was also not economically viable at first, he said. Here, he explained, the government had made sure it could develop by intervening in the market.
In China, he says, such strategic subsidies have long been common. “We would have to accept that in Europe as well, that we have to get the industry going first to overcome this hurdle,” says Gutzmer. This would make it possible to make a much greater contribution to recycling in the case of high-tech metals.
Even when recycling processes are then ramped up to industrial scale, the available material is another problem: The products concerned usually have long lifetimes; the battery of an electric vehicle, for example, can only be recycled after about 15 years.
In countries like China, where there was a market and larger production capacities for lithium-ion cells much earlier, the recycling industry was also ramped up more quickly. In a sense, companies there could already test and optimize recycling processes with production scrap and shortages (Europe.Table reported).
That is why it is important to ensure that secondary raw materials are not exported but remain part of the domestic raw material base, says Paolo Cerruti, COO of battery manufacturer Northvolt. He calls for a ban on exports of recyclable materials. “We need to keep our own materials within our borders,” he said in Brussels this week.
Instead of focusing too much on recycling, policymakers and industry also need to drive other circular economy strategies on a large scale. This is the conclusion of a new study by sustainability consultancy Systemiq with the support of the European Climate Foundation (Europe.Table reported). This includes, for example, promoting car-sharing services, reducing the use of certain raw materials, and keeping products and materials in use for longer.
Various non-governmental organizations have long been calling for binding targets for a reduction in the consumption of primary raw materials. What was possible for limiting CO₂ emissions must also be achieved for the consumption of raw materials and goods, an activist told Europe.Table. The Commission had shown itself open to this idea – but did not want to formulate such targets in the current mandate.
Things won’t get really serious until early May, when the Digital Markets Act takes effect. Informally, however, the EU Commission and the major digital companies are already talking about the new rules, which are intended to limit the market power of the corporations. So far, the contacts have been quite constructive, according to Brussels: “But there is still fighting over the points that could potentially hurt the companies.”
First of all, there is the question of which companies and which of their services fall under the DMA at all. The regulations contain clear thresholds for the so-called gatekeepers – for example, a service must have at least 45 million monthly active users in the EU on a permanent basis. The legal text also lists the types of services to which the DMA’s conduct requirements apply, such as search engines, social networks and app stores.
But not all cases are as clear-cut as Google’s online search or Apple’s App Store. In borderline cases, companies could try to stay below the thresholds by defining the market in their own terms – the Commission does not even want to get involved in such discussions. In addition, there are cases such as Microsoft’s search engine Bing, where the thresholds for user numbers, revenue and stock market value may be reached, but the providers still have little market power. Additionally, the DMA also provides for the softer category of “emerging gatekeepers” that have not yet quite reached the quantitative values.
Who will fall under the DMA will therefore not be known until late summer of next year. After the launch on May 2, companies will have two months to notify the Commission of their services if they meet the criteria. The authority then has 45 working days to classify a company as a gatekeeper and thus bind it to the numerous rules and regulations in articles 5 and 6 of the DMA. The companies can still appeal against this. The Commission is prepared for this to happen, at least in borderline cases.
The authority does not intend to tackle the decision in the less clear-cut cases of whether a company falls into the gatekeeper category until a second wave, partly in order to better distribute the initially high workload. 80 positions are earmarked for supervision at the authority, partly through internal shifts and partly through new jobs in the Directorate-General for Communications Networks, Content and Technology. In addition, around 60 experts will be recruited at Connect and the Joint Research Centre (JRC), which is part of the Commission, in order to implement the Digital Services Act, which will come into force at the same time. The Commission plans to make further additions next year when the revenues from the supervisory fee that the groups concerned have to pay start flowing in.
The teams in the new unit are not to be aligned with individual gatekeepers – so there will be no Team Apple or Team Amazon. Rather, experts from each of the two directorates general are to deal thematically with the individual platform services and the behavioral guidelines tailored to them.
DG Connect officials will also ensure that insights from analyses of major platforms are incorporated under the DSA, for example on online advertising. The new unit at Connect will be headed by Filomena Chirico, who was previously responsible for the DMA in the cabinet of Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton. Also responsible for DMA and DSA will be the new Deputy Director General Renate Nikolay, previously Head of Cabinet of Vice President Věra Jourová.
The experts’ task will be to monitor compliance with the obligations in the DMA. Once they have been assigned as gatekeepers, the companies have six months to implement the necessary technical and organizational changes. In a compliance report, they must explain to the Commission how they now intend to meet the requirements.
The authority can then demand specific improvements, if necessary after consultation with other market participants. Stakeholders are also to be involved in advance: For example, the Commission is planning a workshop for Dec. 5 to discuss how the ban on gatekeepers giving preference to their own offers can be implemented in practice.
In some cases, the companies have already anticipated the changes: For example, Google announced that developers of apps for the Play Store could now offer their European users other payment systems than the one provided by Google. This corresponds to one of the requirements from the DMA, which is aimed at app stores.
Unlike the DSA, the national authorities in the member states play only a minor role in enforcing the new rules. The Commission was established as the “sole enforcer” in the DMA. The national competition authorities can only assist it, for example by receiving complaints. Under the current 11th amendment to the ARC, the German Federal Cartel Office is also to be given the right to investigate possible violations of the DMA. It will then report its findings to the Commission.
The Federal Cartel Office will also have much less scope to take action against the digital groups itself on the basis of German competition law. For practices covered by the DMA, “there will no longer be any need for intervention on the basis of competition law,” says a spokesperson for the Bonn-based authority. However, as far as combinations of services and practices not covered by the DMA are concerned, prohibitions on the basis of Section 19a of the ARC are still possible.
Following the introduction of the new Section 19a in the ARC at the beginning of 2021, the Federal Cartel Office has already initiated a number of proceedings against the digital groups – most recently against Amazon. The extent to which the authority will press ahead with these cases will now be coordinated with the Commission, according to the spokesperson. Here, “it must be clarified on a case-by-case basis, if necessary, to what extent the subjects of ongoing proceedings fall under the DMA”.
“She only eats grains!” In a country where people argue over whether eating (a lot of) meat and machismo go hand in hand, the Prime Minister’s culinary habits have not been spared the polemic. When accused by a government advisor of eating “only grains” over the summer, the prime minister responded a few days later in Elle magazine, “Honestly, I’m pretty hardened by my professional background. But when I see articles attacking my alleged eating habits, I believe I must be dreaming. This is an incredible form of sexism,” she outraged in the magazine.
With that, she showed that she would not be bullied. Since her appointment as Prime Minister by Emmanuel Macron in May this year, she is no longer the gray and bland technician many saw her as, but also a woman who knows how to attack.
The woman referred to as “Borne-out” or “Darth Vader” in the corridors of Parisian power has a reputation as a workhorse known for wearing down her staff. What is her method? “I’ve been an engineer, a prefect and an entrepreneur. I believe in results, not labels,” she said.
She also recalled that she has experience with difficult negotiations and explosive reforms (such as the reform of the SNCF and unemployment insurance under the previous five-year period) and that she can “deliver”.
And she who is considered so stiff, in a very rare moment of openness about her private life, also spoke about the drama of her childhood: the suicide of her father when she was 11, who was a Jewish resistance fighter who was deported to Auschwitz. Elisabeth Borne seeks political compromise – which is rare enough in France – and therefore exhibits qualities far more “Scholz-compatible” than the flamboyance that the French president can display.
In France, however, this is also the nature of the Prime Minister’s mandate: the French head of government is the number two in the state. Appointed by the President of the Republic, the occupant of the Hôtel Matignon in particular holds some executive power and directs the work of the government. But not only that. According to the theory of “safeguarding,” the French Prime Minister takes the blows for the president. Therefore, in the coming week, Elisabeth Borne sees it as her duty to ease the tensions that are currently running high between Paris and Berlin. If she succeeds, Emmanuel Macron will benefit. If she fails, the blame will be hers alone.
