Europe’s ability to deliver a competitive green and digital transition depends on how effectively it can turn raw material scarcity into resilience, innovation, and sustainability. In this context, the EU flagship initiative SCRREEN has, since 2016, supported the European Commission (DG GROW) through its well-established Expert Network, contributing to the development and continuous improvement of factsheets for each Critical Raw Materia included in the EU Critical Raw Materials List.
What is the Raw Materials Week?
The Raw Materials Week is the European Commission’s annual flagship gathering dedicated to raw materials policy, markets, technology, and investment. It convenes EU institutions, industry leaders, researchers, and civil society to discuss strategic priorities for securing Europe’s access to raw materials, covering topics such as supply-chain resilience, circular economy solutions, responsible sourcing, processing capacity, and recycling.
As part of its long-standing contribution to the Raw Materials Week ecosystem, SCRREEN, together with PROMETIA, hosted a dedicated side event on 17 November 2025 at Le Plaza Hotel, Brussels, titled:
“From value chain resilience to responsible technological solutions: Unlocking the EU by-product potential through innovative processing and recycling.”
The event was designed as a high-level, solution-oriented forum to explore how Europe can better leverage industrial residues, by-products, and minor metals, often underutilised streams with significant strategic value, by scaling innovative processing and recycling routes and connecting them to real industrial demand.
Two high-level panels, one shared objective: making by-products a strategic resource
The programme featured two complementary panel discussions, structured to connect policy ambition with industrial reality:
- “How can industrial innovation secure the EU by-product supply?”
This session focused on how innovation can strengthen supply security by improving recovery yields, reducing losses across processing steps, and enabling economically viable valorisation of by-products, thereby reinforcing the resilience of European value chains. - “From R&D to industry: concrete developments”
This panel highlighted tangible progress and pathways from research and demonstration to industrial deployment, showing how technological maturity, investment readiness, and collaboration across the value chain can accelerate uptake and impact.
Why this matters now
By-products and industrial residues represent a powerful opportunity to:
- Reduce dependency on imported primary raw materials,
- Increase circularity by recovering value from existing industrial streams,
- Lower environmental impacts through resource efficiency and improved recycling,
- Support future-proof raw materials strategies aligned with Europe’s competitiveness and sustainability goals.
In short, the event reinforced a core message: Europe can build strategic autonomy not only by securing new supply, but also by maximising the value of what it already produces, through better processing, smarter recovery, and circular business thinking.
For those who would like to discover the list of speakers and the event’s key information at a glance, the event leaflet is available and includes full speaker details.
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The SCRREEN3 project has received funding from the European Union's Horizon Europe Research and Innovation Programme under Grant Agreement N° 101138060