Activating strategic raw materials recovery: the case of electrical and electronic equipment

The EU faces increasing pressure on vital resources due to geopolitical pressures and the transition to climate neutrality, especially for critical raw materials (CRM) and strategic raw materials (SRM). The Critical Raw Materials Act sets benchmarks for EU extraction (10%), processing (40%), and recycling (25%) for meeting the EU’s annual needs for SRMs by 2030. This white paper outlines possibilities to recover SRMs from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE). A waste stream that holds many SRMs, of which few are currently recovered. This paper is intended for policy-makers, waste management specialists, public authorities, research institutes and producer responsibility organisations within the EU. Using a case study of the Netherlands, we examine the current system for recovery of WEEE and the possibilities to increase SRM recovery. We argue that SRMs within WEEE have the potential to meet up to over 30% of the EU’s current demand for specific materials. Realising this potential requires policy adjustments, improved data collection and management, enhanced collaboration among stakeholders and a technological push. The key bottlenecks and recommendations for the recovery of SRMs from WEEE are: WEEE collection levels and the collection of broken or unused products from households and businesses needs to increase: - In 2020, the Netherlands collected 44% of the available waste against a target of 65%. Most EU countries fail to meet their collection targets. Roughly 9% of all electronic products in households and businesses in the Netherlands are unused or broken.
- Recommendation (policy/NL): incentivise better disposal by consumers & businesses of household stock and collection of products that are currently lost, looking to front-running EU examples. Existing policy needs to be adapted to promote and incentivise the recovery of critical and strategic materials and transparency of recycled materials: - The WEEE policy promotes the collection and recovery of WEEE based on mass, not specific materials, e.g., CRMs or SRMs. - Recommendation (policy/EU and NL): increase the incentives for better pre-separation, recovering smaller quantity materials and transparency in WEEE reporting. Greater collaboration between organisations and policy changes are needed to increase the knowledge of the composition of electronic products: - The heterogeneous nature of WEEE makes estimating the material composition incredibly challenging without repeated testing. There is little to no transparency and information provided by producers of E-products in the Netherlands.
- Recommendation (policy/NL): every producer who brings an E-product to the Dutch market has to declare what CRMs and SRMs are in this product (following the example of France). - Recommendation (policy/NL): better collaboration is needed between research organisations and PROs to share data and undertake lab testing to increase the knowledge of product compositions. A push is needed to businesses and research institutions to develop and deploy CRM recovery technologies: - Recommendation (Activity/NL/EU): Companies and research institutions involved in the R&D and deployment of CRM & SRM recovery technologies should join forces to develop new projects. The Dutch government should develop a roadmap towards SRM recovery by 2030, which provides direction and boundary conditions for stakeholders: - Numerous barriers exist for the stakeholders involved in the collection and recovery of SRMs from WEEE. Overcoming these barriers requires multiple parties to work together ; - Recommendation (NL): provide a coordinated roadmap that combines all the boundary conditions, R&D, value chain integration for the recovery of SRMs and market activation for their use in EU industry. We identify 11 SRM hotspots in WEEE that provide the basis for technological and projects development.