Many of the materials classed as critical by the European Commission are those materials whose availability can disrupt the supply chain, or where the extraction of virgin material has a significantly high impact. The fact that such a large quantity of these materials is being discarded in landfill within WEEE products represents a real lost opportunity, both economically and environmentally. Going forward, for the Critical Raw Materials Recovery Project we have chosen to work with four different countries to reflect the range of systems operating across Europe. Countries with mature WEEE recovery are able to test the potential to increase recovery, whereas countries with less mature collection systems will have the potential to make significant impact through implementation of new collection and reprocessing activity. By testing collection and recovery in a range of countries, we’ll be able to better understand the most effective routes for collection systems required across Europe to deliver significant change. The project is due to run over three and a half years, and the overall aim is to demonstrate viable approaches to increase the recovery of target critical raw materials by five per cent within the project lifetime. These can be from products such as consumer electronics, ICT equipment and small household appliances. Yet there are also a number of other objectives that the project will aim to demonstrate. For example, it hopes to show the environmental, economic and social benefits that an innovative circular economy for critical raw materials could deliver. Or how innovation in collection, reuse, recycling and other forms of recovery of WEEE could increase recovery. And it will also use the learnings as key inputs to a European infrastructure plan for collection and recovery of products, parts, components and critical raw materials from WEEE. The project is currently still in its infancy, although you can keep up progress by following @CRMRecovery on Twitter, or for updates, check the website – criticalrawmaterialrecovery.eu