At the Raw Materials Week 2025 side event “Crossroads of Innovation: Shared Challenges and Joint Solutions in Raw Materials,” 11 Horizon Europe projects working across the raw materials value chain came together to address a critical question for Europe’s future: how can the objectives of the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) be translated into real industrial deployment?
The discussion brought together perspectives from across the European critical raw materials (CRM) ecosystem, including mining and industrial companies, SMEs, research organisations, universities, consultancies, civil society representatives, and policy stakeholders.
These exchanges have now been captured in a new policy brief and accompanying policy paper developed by the REESOURCE project together with AVANTIS, BLOOM, PERMANET, PERSEPHONE, REEPRODUCE, REMHub, REPTiS, RESQTOOL, START, and SUPREEMO.
From targets to implementation
The findings point to a clear conclusion: Europe’s CRM ambitions are not primarily limited by resource availability or technological readiness. Instead, implementation bottlenecks remain the key barrier to achieving the CRMA objectives.
The policy brief identifies several major challenges currently slowing down industrial deployment and the development of resilient European CRM value chains:
- Financing gaps for pilot and first-of-a-kind (FOAK) plants
- Regulatory fragmentation across Member States
- Lengthy and unpredictable permitting procedures
- Limited exploration and scale-up capacity
- Social acceptance and community engagement challenges
Stakeholders highlighted that moving from innovation to industrial reality requires stronger support mechanisms capable of de-risking scale-up and accelerating deployment across the entire CRM ecosystem.
Key priorities for action
The policy brief outlines a set of priority recommendations emerging from stakeholder input:
- De-risk industrial scale-up to bridge the gap between pilot projects and commercial deployment
- Improve regulatory coherence to support circular CRM flows
- Ensure predictable, efficient, and transparent permitting procedures
- Strengthen transparency and traceability across value chains
- Reinforce exploration and processing capacity in Europe
- Embed early and meaningful community engagement into project development
The analysis underlines that addressing these implementation challenges will be essential for building resilient and domestically anchored CRM supply chains in Europe.
Access the publications
The policy brief is available here:
Policy Brief – Crossroads of Innovation: Shared Challenges and Joint Solutions in Raw Materials
The accompanying policy paper can be accessed here:
Policy Paper – Unlocking Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) in Europe: Bottlenecks, Challenges, and Prospective Priorities
By bringing together stakeholder perspectives from across industry, research, academia, civil society, and consulting, the publications contribute to ongoing European discussions on how to effectively implement the CRMA and strengthen Europe’s strategic autonomy in critical raw materials.