According to the Commission, the act’s entry into force provides a legislative framework that benefits domestic capacities, efforts related to diversification as well as sustainability and circular economy. It contains “benchmarks to increase capacities for the extraction, processing, and recycling of critical raw materials in the EU”.
On the day of CRMA’s entry into force, the Critical Raw Materials Board met for the first time, and parallelly, opened the “Call for Strategic Project Applications”. The former, the CRM Board, consisting of high-level representatives of all EU member state and the European Commission, was addressed by Executive Vice-President for European Green Deal Maroš Šefčovič as well as European Commissioner for Internal Market Thierry Breton. The latter, the Strategic Project Call is open for project proposals having the potential to provide a “meaningful contribution to the security of the Union’s supply of strategic raw materials”. In addition, as part of the CRMA, a “match-making” survey is also deployed, the goal of which is to help suppliers meet with the aggregate demand.
CRMA entered into force after a long period of preparation, the developments of which was not only closely monitored in EuChemS Magazine, but at the very beginning of the legislative process, EuChemS also contributed to a public consultation related to the Act. In the consultation, EuChemS argued for increasing the EU’s refining and recycling capacities of, as well as substitutions for criticalmaterials, amongst other things. This interest is warranted by CRMA’s relevance to scarce elements. Element scarcity is tackled by the EuChemS Periodic Table, and the science-policy workshops related to it.
