CRMs in the context of a circular economy

Recycling can take the pressure of sourcing certain materials from primary sources. Recycling cannot be 100% efficient due to technical and societal losses. There may be also technical or chemical difficulties in separating certain chemical elements, meaning that a recycling process cannot necessarily separate out all the original components of a composite material or a complex product. This can mean that the resulting recycled material will have to have a different and sometime lower-quality use (down-cycling).