Can the circular economy reduce our dependencies?
A battery that has reached the end of its life contains valuable materials. But who has the expertise to recover them? And who is capable of turning that expertise into sustainable industrial processes? These questions show that the circular economy is not merely an environmental strategy: it can also help to strengthen manufacturing capacity and reduce economic dependencies.
The energy transition reduces reliance on fossil fuels, but increases demand for the materials needed for batteries, wind turbines and other technologies. Extraction, refining and the manufacture of components are often concentrated in just a few areas of the world. For Europe, the risk is that it will replace part of its energy dependence with new material and industrial dependencies. The Critical Raw Materials Act seeks to address this issue by, amongst other things, establishing a European recycling capacity equivalent to at least 25 per cent of annual consumption of strategic raw materials by 2030.
It is an important objective, but having waste to recover does not mean being any less dependent. If a country collects used batteries but has to export them because it lacks the processes and facilities to recover the metals they contain, that dependence may simply shift further down the supply chain. It is not just a question of how many resources a country retains, but of who is able to give them new economic value.
This is where the link between the circular economy and knowledge comes to the fore. Circularity is not an inherent property of waste: it is the result of the expertise that enables waste to be transformed into resources. Scientific knowledge enables us to understand materials and identify new possibilities for separation, recovery or substitution. Technological expertise translates these possibilities into viable solutions, ranging from the design of repairable products to regeneration processes. Industrial expertise enables these solutions to be applied on a large scale, whilst meeting requirements for cost, quality and reliability.
These steps do not form an automatic sequence. A laboratory discovery does not necessarily become a usable technology; a promising technology does not automatically turn into a production process. And the difficulties encountered on the factory floor can, in turn, give rise to new scientific questions. The circular transition arises from the interaction between research, technological development and industrial learning, not merely from the availability of waste to be recycled.
