Enabling smart, sustainable and innovative solutions to boost Europe’s exploration, mining and processing activities

Minerals and metals are essential to modern society and the key to a more sustainable and carbon-neutral future. Europe is facing the challenge of increasing demand for raw materials combined with a high import dependency and increasingly demanding exploration, mining and processing scenarios.

EIT RawMaterials publishes its first position paper introducing on the Lighthouse Sustainable Discovery and Supply looking into the strategic issues such as the supply of critical raw materials, social acceptance of the primary raw materials sector and resource efficiency in mineral processing. The position paper also describing the Lighthouse programme main goals such as Unlocking the potential for a renewed raw materials sector in Europe as a driver for domestic raw material value chains as well as Building on Europe’s existing strengths in industry, research, innovation and infrastructure and Reducing the footprint of the raw materials sector (waste-water-energy-emissions).

A special focus is dedicated to the alignments with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and specifically SDG 12 – by 2030 the sustainable management and efficient use of natural resources.

EIT RawMaterials Lighthouse Sustainable Discovery and Supply Launch Event is taking place on 28 October ahead of this year’s 12th Fennoscandian Exploration and Mining (FEM 2019) conference in Levi, Finland.

The event will celebrate the launch of the paper and will cover key topics such as the challenges and opportunities in the raw materials sector and the strategic actions EIT RawMaterials together with its diverse partner network are taking to create momentum and reverse the trend of negative growth and resource dependency that has left Europe vulnerable to supply shortage on its path to a clean, green, and circular society.