Building an onshore wind farm requires nearly nine times more mineral resources than a gas-fired power station. And as the energy transition accelerates, driven by electrification, the spread of renewables and the development of new technologies, demand for critical raw materials (CRMs) is rising in step. To avoid being structurally dependent on a handful of global heavyweights in production and refining, such as China, the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Australia, Europe has another card to play: a sprawling urban mine whose potential, still largely untapped, has now been mapped for the first time.
According to the FutuRaM (Future Availability of Secondary Raw Materials) report, by 2050, urban waste streams could meet more than half of Europe's demand for critical materials. That contribution would shore up the resilience of European supply chains while curbing the need for new mining activities and the environmental and social costs that come with it.
Europe's urban mine and its untapped potential
The report and the accompanying Urban Mine Platform, developed as part of the project, together amount to the most comprehensive analysis available of CRMs in European waste streams, helping to quantify both the availability and the recovery potential of these materials. The initiative examined 42 critical elements across seven waste categories, from wind turbines to end-of-life vehicles, and brought together 28 partners from across the continent. The aim was to produce data, methodologies and tools capable of measuring the scale of the urban mine and to support the development of public policies, strategic planning, and long-term monitoring.
The analysis, which covered not only EU member states but also Switzerland, the United Kingdom, Norway and Iceland, estimates that by 2050 between 4.1 and 5.7 million tonnes of critical raw materials could be recovered each year. Under a circular economy scenario, that volume could replace up to 56% of primary material imports, confirming the strategic role of Europe's urban mine in strengthening supply-chain autonomy and easing reliance on third countries.
“Reaching a 56% substitution rate by 2050 requires more than simply improving the recovery of secondary and critical raw materials”, said Giulia Iattoni, Assistant Programme Officer at UNITAR, the United Nations Institute for Training and Research. “The 33% baseline reflects a business-as-usual pathway in which product and material consumption continue to grow at current rates, while collection and recovery practices remain largely unchanged. Achieving the higher circularity scenario depends on combining significantly higher collection, sorting, recycling, and recovery rates with broader circular economy measures that reduce overall demand for primary raw materials.”
This means “ensuring that substantially more end-of-life products enter compliant collection systems, reducing losses along the recycling chain, and scaling up technologies capable of recovering critical raw materials that are currently lost. At the same time, product lifetimes need to be extended through repair, reuse, and refurbishment, while material consumption is moderated through more circular business models, such as sharing and product-as-a- service schemes. In short, the 56% scenario requires both supply-side improvements in material recovery and demand-side measures that reduce the need for virgin raw materials. Neither approach alone is sufficient to achieve the highest substitution rate; the greatest gains come from combining the two.”
Thanks to well-established national treatment systems, five CRM categories, including platinum, already achieve collection rates above 80%. For many other materials, however, the picture is quite different. Tonnes of valuable resources are lost along the value chain, diverted into informal channels or, in many cases, never leaving our homes at all, lying unused in drawers. Recovery rates for metals such as copper, palladium and nickel fall into the intermediate range of 40% to 80%, while for 22 of the materials analysed, the quantities recovered remain negligible, amounting to less than one tonne.
In this context, recovering raw materials means reducing the vulnerability of global supply chains, developing new circular economy business models and delivering significant environmental benefits, including climate change mitigation. Every tonne returned to productive use helps ease pressure on primary extraction and reduces the emissions associated with producing virgin materials. According to the report, in recent years, the annual recovery of secondary raw materials has already delivered a net climate benefit of around 39 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent. By 2050, that figure could rise to between 81 and 273 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent, roughly equal to Spain's annual greenhouse gas emissions.
Prioritising collection, monitoring and reporting
Over the coming decades, the number of products containing critical raw materials is expected to grow, particularly in the renewable energy and electric mobility sectors, such as batteries. Consequently, it will become increasingly important to recover these resources and prevent their waste or export from Europe through informal channels, as is still the case for various categories of end-of-life products.
According to the report, by the middle of the century, 17 of the critical raw materials analysed could achieve recovery rates exceeding 80%. Reaching that goal, however, will not be possible under a business-as-usual approach. Targeted industrial strategies and a coherent package of policy measures will be needed to unlock the full potential of Europe's urban mine.
“Improving the collection, monitoring, and reporting of secondary raw materials stands out as a particularly urgent priority”, adds Iattoni. “A significant share of valuable materials still bypasses official collection and treatment systems, meaning that potential secondary raw materials are lost before they can even be accessed for recovery. At the same time, data on material flows remains fragmented and inconsistent across Europe. Better collection systems, combined with harmonised reporting and monitoring, would improve understanding of where critical raw materials are located, how they move through the chain, and where losses occur. Without reliable data and an effective collection infrastructure, it is difficult to design targeted policies, attract investment, or scale up recovery projects. Improving knowledge of material flows and ensuring that waste enters compliant treatment systems, therefore, provides the foundation on which all other measures can be built upon.”
Towards common standards
Among the experts' key policy recommendations is extending the UNFC (United Nations Framework Classification) system, originally developed for fossil energy resources and primary mining residues, to secondary resources as well. Applying the framework more broadly would improve transparency, data comparability and confidence among both investors and policymakers.
“The main challenge we aimed to address was the lack of a consistent, transparent, and reproducible way to apply the UNFC to secondary raw material recovery projects”, says Iattoni. “While UNFC had been developed and widely applied for primary resources, its application to anthropogenic resources was still new and lacked a practical methodology and reporting structure. SARA4UNFC was developed to bridge this gap by providing a structured framework and digital tool that enables comparable and traceable project assessments.”
The UNFC framework assesses resources across three dimensions – environmental and socio-economic viability, technical feasibility, and the confidence of resource estimates – by establishing a common framework to classify them consistently. The SARA4UNFC tool facilitates the assessment and comparison of raw material recovery projects through a structured seven-step methodology, with a focus on the recoverability of secondary raw materials from different waste streams. In doing so, it supports decision-making, reduces investment uncertainty and improves transparency across recycling value chains, facilitating dialogue between policymakers, businesses and investors.
And what would success look like in five years' time? “It would mean that SARA4UNFC is widely used to classify anthropogenic resource recovery projects across different waste streams and countries, becoming a recognised reference for project developers, policymakers, investors, and regulators”, concludes Iattoni. “A key milestone in this direction was its official recognition by the UNECE Expert Group on Resource Management (EGRM) during Resource Management Week in April. Ultimately, success would be reflected in the broad adoption of SARA4UNFC as the standard approach for UNFC-based classification of secondary raw material recovery projects.”
Cover: photo by Envato