Following a successful vote in the European Parliament this September on the European Union’s raw material strategy - with particular emphasis on urban mining - the European Commission (EC) has released another long-term strategy as it tries to boost the recycling and reuse of more valuable minerals that would otherwise be landfilled.
This latest strategy, a ‘Resource Efficiency Roadmap’, looks towards 2050; it argues for a reshaping of EU markets, prices, taxes and subsidies to better reflect the cost (including environmental harm) of resource use, locking the economy into an unsustainable path. It calls for long-term innovative thinking in business, finance and politics, plus identifying gaps in knowledge and skills.
In particular, however, the roadmap calls for a redoubling of EU efforts to improve recycling and reuse of materials, noting: “Each year we throw away 3bn tonnes of waste in Europe and overall this figure...