In September 2022, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen announced a European Raw Materials Act (CRMA) in her State of the EU address. “We will work on strategic projects along the entire supply chain – from extraction, processing and recycling to refining”, she added. Following a very short consultation phase, the European Commission presented its proposal in March 2023. As in the Commission President's announcement, strategic projects are at the heart of CRMA. At the same time, they pose one of the greatest risks to the protection of the environment and human rights. According to the EU Commission, strategic projects within and outside the EU are to be identified and then enforced over other interests, such as nature conservation. The numerous human rights risks that have been addressed by various legislations in recent years are also not adequately reflected in the law. Instead, the CRMA relies on certificates or the intention to engage in a voluntary private industrial alliance as a strategic project. This type of acceleration risks massively eroding both environmental and health impact assessments and democratic participatory processes.
More than 40 European environmental and human rights organisations have joined forces Requirements for this law formulated. These include:
1. The EU should actively reduce its dependence on primary raw materials and implement demand-side solutions to reduce raw material consumption by at least 10 % by 2030. % to lower. These include the phasing out of single-use products containing critical raw materials, the introduction of a material passporting system and the adoption of national programmes to promote material efficiency and the use of alternative materials.
2. The CRMA should not rely solely on certification schemes to assess the sustainability of a mining project, as certification alone is not a guarantee of compliance with binding human rights and environmental legislation. Instead, a more comprehensive assessment of human rights and environmental performance should be carried out, taking into account criteria such as multi-stakeholder governance, compliance with comprehensive standards, disclosure rules, accessible complaint mechanisms and public audit reports.
3. The CRMA’s focus on EU security of supply through partnerships lacks a global justice approach and concrete measures to ensure sustainability standards, civil society participation and the protection of human rights and the environment in third countries. Recommendations include aligning partnerships with international agreements, establishing robust monitoring and remediation mechanisms, defining ‘added value’, supporting domestic industrialisation, engaging civil society and indigenous peoples, ensuring transparency and avoiding undermining obligations through other regulations or trade agreements.
4. The CRMA’s focus on accelerating permitting procedures for critical raw material projects risks circumventing environmental and social protection measures and lacks public acceptance. This underlines the need to strike a balance between environmental protection, public participation and reduced permitting times, while including elements such as free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) and the rights of indigenous peoples, reference to international instruments, allocation of resources to permitting authorities, reference to international agreements, ensuring transparency, setting up a subgroup on sustainability and responsible mining within the Committee on Critical Raw Materials and banning deep-sea mining due to possible environmental and social impacts.
5. For the success of the European Green Deal and the EU’s strategic autonomy, it is crucial to prioritise the circular economy approach in the CRMA by implementing an ambitious recycling strategy, improving coherence with the waste hierarchy, increasing EU targets for recycling capacity, improving the collection and separation of carbon-containing components, proposing targets for the recycling share of all carbon-containing products, including public procurement measures and ensuring that mining waste recovery follows comprehensive rules and includes plans for the remediation of contaminated sites.
6. The CRMA should include comprehensive rules for calculating and verifying the environmental footprint of critical raw materials, taking into account clear criteria for determining a significant environmental footprint, taking into account the impact on the circular economy and recycling companies, international standards and sustainable practices, conducting ex ante assessments and consultations with relevant stakeholders, enabling scientific advice from the European Scientific Advisory Board on Climate Change, ensuring environmental footprint statements for all critical raw materials placed on the market, including intermediate and final products, and adopting delegated acts setting performance classes for the environmental footprint with specific parameters.
Photo: Guillaume Périgois on Unsplash
