Is Europe too late to the metal recycling game?

Europe’s critical raw materials crisis has a partial answer sitting in the waste stream — but the continent has been too slow to see it.

Dorota Włoch, CEO of Eneris Surowce, was direct: recycling is no longer optional.

Unlike plastics, metals can be recovered and reused indefinitely, making urban mining — the recovery of raw materials from existing products and waste — increasingly valuable, particularly for batteries.

“From recycling, we recover metallic aluminium and so-called black mass, which is a concentrate of metals, mainly cobalt-nickel. These are some of the most valuable battery metals. And batteries are crucial today, not only in the automotive sector, but also in storing energy from renewable sources such as wind and solar,” she said.

‘Europe is 25 years late’

Włoch put the scale of the problem plainly. “Deposits are critical — any machine can be bought, but natural resources are not. They are non-transferable and non-renewable. If we use them, they simply disappear,” she said.

Europe’s belated recognition of that reality has cost it dearly.

“The regulation of critical raw materials came 25 years after other regions of the world had invested heavily in deposits. Europe was too passive. Today we are catching up, but the regulations are often so demanding that countries like Poland have difficulty implementing them.”

Who benefits most from extraction?

Poland holds significant reserves of raw materials critical to the modern economy, such as copper, coking coal, nickel, platinum group metals, helium, rhenium, lead and silver.

But the minerals needed most for the energy transition, such as lithium, cobalt and graphite, exist only in limited quantities, forcing imports.

Arkadiusz Kustra, dean of the faculty of civil engineering and resource management at AGH University of Science and Technology in Kraków, told a panel at the European Economic Congress that awareness of the full supply chain, and who profits from it, was now essential.

He pointed to Serbia as a case study.

“Serbia has lithium deposits and is already in talks with Mercedes or Stellantis,” he said. Belgrade is using that leverage to attract investment in battery factories and car plants, keeping more of the value chain at home.

The goal, Kustra argued, should be regional supply chains that retain added value locally.

“You can earn the least at the beginning and the most from the end customer,” he said.

The bigger obstacle is Chinese dominance.

“Margins in critical raw materials largely go to the Chinese, who control more than 90% of processing and trading, even though they do not own most of the deposits,” he said.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo — among the world’s most resource-rich countries — Chinese entities control around 90% of deposits.

The panel also pointed to growing interest in new supply partnerships, with Poland eyeing assets in the Congo region and the Americas.