The EU circular economy and its relevance to metal recycling

Abstract

This paper provides an overview of ongoing European policy actions to improve the circular management of non-ferrous metals. After explaining why metals are at the center of the European Union’s circular economy initiative, the authors outline a number of issues that still need tackling to “close the loop”, and prevent Europe’s metals from being landfilled, incinerated, or exported without guarantee of high-quality treatment. Electronic waste is focused on in detail during this analysis, because of the special challenges in environmentally sound recovery of smaller quantities of valuable and precious metals. In particular, the authors find that a mandatory certification scheme for recyclers of electronic waste, in or out of Europe, would help to incentivize high-quality treatment processes and efficient material recovery. More generally, the article finds that the European Commission’s waste legislation proposals and Action Plan begins to address key challenges, provided the requirements are implemented strongly and consistently across Member States. In particular, it is crucial that EU policy establishes level playing field conditions for European metals recyclers.