How can Europe ensure reliable access to critical raw materials and advanced technologies for key industrial sectors, while strategic raw material industries struggle due to high energy prices, regulatory complexity, and permitting challenges?
Anna-Maria Karjalainen: Copper and strategic metals are indispensable for decarbonisation, electrification, digitalisation, and resilience, which shows that Europe cannot achieve any of these transformations without securing their supply. The response requires a coherent, holistic policy approach that genuinely aligns all relevant legislation around a shared objective, rather than allowing frameworks to work at cross-purposes.
In practice, this means pursuing an all-of-the-above strategy: simultaneously promoting domestic mining, refining, recycling, and imports, underpinned by a full value-chain perspective. Two further enabling conditions are equally critical.
First, access to competitively priced low-carbon electricity: these are energy-intensive sectors that cannot remain globally competitive or achieve their own decarbonisation goals without affordable, clean power.
Recycling alone will not be sufficient to meet projected demand — domestic mining must develop in parallel
Second, a more pragmatic and consistent approach to permitting: high environmental standards must be maintained — and the industry is committed to meeting them — but the rules themselves need to be implemented more coherently and consistently across all member states.
How can the new Critical Raw Materials Centre and other related EU initiatives help Europe build autonomy in clean tech, energy, and defence supply chains while keeping markets efficient and open?
AMK: Several upcoming initiatives present real opportunities to improve the situation. The Circular Economy Act can meaningfully advance recycling by improving e-waste collection and creating a genuine single market for secondary material streams — removing the existing barriers to their cross-border movement across Europe.
The Environmental Omnibus and the Industrial Accelerator Act both address permitting and are moving in the right direction, but further ambition is needed. In particular, the Water Framework Directive requires urgent attention: it is consistently raised as one of the most significant obstacles across critical raw material industries, and there is a clear opportunity to make it more pragmatic and implementable at member state level while maintaining high standards.
Europe needs an all-of-the-above strategy: promoting domestic mining, refining, recycling, and imports simultaneously
Finally, the post-2030 ETS framework will be decisive for competitiveness. These sectors compete globally and decarbonisation targets must be upheld, but the design must include robust carbon leakage protections.
How can joint purchasing, stockpiling, and recycling of critical raw materials reduce dependencies? What are the practical limits in terms of cost, scalability, and industrial competitiveness?
AMK: On joint purchasing, the picture is nuanced. For copper — which already trades on well-established, transparent and diversified global markets — the added value is likely limited. For smaller or less liquid metals, the case may be stronger.
Recycling, by contrast, represents a genuine opportunity: half of all copper consumed in Europe today already comes from recycled sources, and there is meaningful room to increase this share. However, demand is projected to roughly double by 2050, and copper typically remains embedded in products for around 25 years before reaching end of life.
The Water Framework Directive is one of the most significant obstacles across critical raw material industries
This means Europe can only recycle what has already come to end of life — and no amount of circular ambition can compress that timeline. Recycling alone will therefore not be sufficient to meet projected demand. Domestic mining must develop in parallel, and diversified import strategies must remain part of the equation.
Based in Brussels, the International Copper Association (ICA) is the leading advocate for the copper industry. As ICA’s European branch, the organization represents companies that mine, smelt, and recycle copper for use across the economy, in the electricity system, buildings, transport, and industry. Through a team of policy, industry, and scientific experts, ICA Europe promotes copper as an essential material for achieving the EU’s ambition of a resilient, climate-neutral Europe and seeks to ensure that EU policies enable the sustainable production of copper to serve Europe’s future needs.
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