Critical raw materials are indispensable to Europe’s industrial base and its green and digital transformation. Electrification, renewable energy, industrial decarbonisation and digital technologies are increasing demand for metals and minerals. Yet Europe remains highly dependent on external suppliers, while growing global demand is placing increasing pressure on the planet’s finite resources.
Securing Europe’s supply therefore requires a combined approach: diversifying external supplies, developing responsible extraction and processing capacity in Europe, and reducing demand for primary raw materials. Using resources more efficiently, extending product lifetimes and developing reuse, repair, remanufacturing and recycling can help Europe retain valuable materials, reduce dependencies and create new industrial activities and jobs.
This requires an industrial strategy covering the entire value chain, supported by a workforce strategy that anticipates changing employment and skills needs. Workers must have access to training and quality jobs, while social dialogue and high occupational health and safety standards must guide the development of new activities and technologies.
Maintaining industrial capacity in Europe
Participants warned that Europe is losing critical metals production, processing and recycling capacity. Collecting scrap will not strengthen strategic autonomy if it is exported and processed elsewhere under lower environmental and social standards.
Europe must retain the facilities, affordable energy and skilled workforce needed to turn recovered materials into new industrial products. Trade, energy and circular economy policies must support this objective.
“Europe cannot build strategic autonomy while exporting valuable materials to countries with lower social and environmental standards and losing its processing capacity. We need an integrated industrial policy that supports investment across circular value chains and maintains industrial activity in Europe,” said Judith Kirton-Darling, General Secretary of industriAll Europe.
An industrial strategy beyond recycling
Circularity starts with product design and depends on repair, reuse, effective collection and demand for secondary raw materials.
For industriAll Europe, the forthcoming Circular Economy Act must go beyond removing regulatory barriers. Europe needs industrial investment, effective collection systems, common standards and measures to create stable demand for recycled materials. Public procurement and product requirements can help create lead markets for circular products manufactured in Europe.
Affordable clean energy will also be decisive. Without a coherent energy and industrial policy, Europe risks collecting more materials while losing the facilities capable of processing them.
Workers make circularity possible
Circular activities can create jobs, but their quality cannot be taken for granted. The European Trade Union Institute stressed the need to anticipate changing skills through training and social dialogue. It also warned that recycling can transform existing occupational risks or create new ones. Safety and prevention must therefore be built into industrial processes from the start.
The experience of FGTB representatives at Comet-Sambre illustrated how strong worker representation can support technological investment and improved workplace safety. Participants also stressed the need for well funded public services and safe working conditions in waste collection, echoing the demands made by industriAll Europe and the European Public Service Union, EPSU, in their recent joint article on the Circular Economy Act.
“Workers make the circular economy possible, but their interests cannot be treated as an afterthought. The Circular Economy Act must deliver quality jobs, skills, safe working conditions and strong collective bargaining. Workers and their trade unions must have a say in how new technologies and value chains are developed,” said Judith Kirton-Darling.
Circular reindustrialisation must be socially just
The Circular Economy Act should support European reindustrialisation while promoting quality employment, training, collective bargaining and high occupational health and safety standards. Trade unions must be involved in shaping policies, technologies and investment projects.
Europe cannot secure critical raw materials without maintaining the industrial capacity and skilled workforce needed to process and reuse them. Workers’ rights and social dialogue are not additions to circular industrial policy. They are conditions for its success.