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Minerals and metals are ingredients necessary for the production of multiple goods and services that are essential to contemporary societies, feeding frequently complex global supply chains. The development of the modern, material-intensive lifestyles has led to a formidable acceleration of their production, particularly since the middle of the 20th century. Despite all the progress that can and needs to be done towards a circular, resource-efficient global economy, several important trends including: demographic growth (United Nations 2019 ), the rapid development of the global middle class (Kharas 2017 ), growing urbanisation (United Nations 2018 ) and the transition towards a low-carbon global economy (Hund et al. 2020 ) point towards a continued, exponential growth of the global demand and production of minerals and metals (Christmann 2017 ; Elshkaki et al. 2018 ; Halada et al. 2008 ; Hund et al. 2020 ; Schipper et al. 2018 ). Despite the efforts made by some producers and some authorities to strengthen the already important contribution of the minerals and metals industry to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), the production of minerals and metals has negative impacts both on the global and on local ecosystems. It already contributes to 16% of global CO 2 emissions (OECD 2019 ) and it generates about 50 bn t solid waste per year, 25 times the estimated annual amount of urban waste (Franks et al. 2021 ). This waste is composed of mostly barren rock fragments, essentially overburden that needed to be stripped to access the ore, and of fine-grained ore processing tailings. The latter, if containing sulphides such as pyrite and residual minerals containing elements such as arsenic, cadmium, mercury, selenium or tellurium, can become highly problematic for the well-being of future generations. The production of minerals and metals also can be a source of conflicts and of social disruption. Failure to globally and sustainably manage the production of minerals and metals, in a transparent and multilateral framework providing a stable, foreseeable and level playing field for investors and for trade, could limit the capacity of the industry to reply to future demand and lead to potentially disastrous global conflicts. Depending on the practices of individual producers, on the quality of national and/or regional regulatory frameworks and on the effectiveness of their implementation, a same mineral or metal can be produced under very differing environmental and social conditions. Despite progress on sustainability performance reporting and of transparency of some parts of the industry, end-users of...

Rare earth elements, key to many high-technology applications, are regularly making headlines, even in general public newspapers. Will the word run short of rare earth elements and of the many applications that rest on their use? In support to French and European Union policy making, as well as in support to industrial clients, BRGM is monitoring rare earth markets from the supply and the demand sides, as well as for technological shifts that drive them. Not every rare earth element is effectively rare and there are well over 400 ongoing rare earth exploration projects worldwide. Nevertheless, some rare earth elements such as dysprosium, europium and terbium are rare, in high and fast growing demand; as they either are indispensable to the production of Fe-B-Nd (Dy) permanent magnets, the highest performance magnetic material currently being available at industrial scale, or to the production of phosphors essential to the production of fluorescent compact, energy saving, light bulbs and video displays. At the current 10% compound annual growth rate of the demand for these elements, the question arises of their the future availability. Among the many rare-earth bearing minerals apatite is of particular interest as a potential source of rare earth elements, as it is a widespread mineral, forming huge deposits such as the sedimentary and magmatic phosphate deposits. An overview of the potential of sedimentary phosphate deposits as an important source for future rare earth production is presented and discussed.In addition to knowledge about the distribution and concentration of individual rare earth elements in sedimentary phosphate deposits, it is also necessary to understand the partitioning of the individual elements between phosphogypsum and phosphoric acid in the fertilizer production process, as well as available technologies to recover and separate individual rare earth elements from these materials. This could pave the way to the generation of extra added-value for phosphate producers, and to the broadening of the international production base of rare earth elements in high demand by the global economy. The many applications of rare earth elementsAccording the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC), rare earth elements (REE) are a group of 17 elements with closely related physical and chemical properties, the 15 lanthanides plus scandium and yttrium. As scandium occurs in different ore deposits than the other REE, only the 16 other elements are further considered and discussed here. Those 16 elements are commonly divided into two groups [1]: the light rare earth elements (LREE) : lanthanum (La), cerium (Ce), praseodymium (Pr), neodymium (Nd), promethium (Pm) and samarium (Sm);

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In this article, we explore concrete examples of circularity strategies for critical raw materials (CRMs) in commercial settings. We propose a company-level framework for systematically evaluating circularity strategies (e.g., material recycling, product reuse, and product or component lifetime extension) in specific applications of CRMs from the perspectives of specific industrial actors. This framework is applied in qualitative analyses—informed by relevant literature and expert consultation—of five case studies across a range of industries: (1) rhenium in high-pressure turbine components, (2) platinum group metals in industrial catalysts for chemical processing and oil refining, (3) rare earth permanent magnets in computer hard disk drives, (4) various CRMs in consumer electronics, and (5) helium in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) machines. Drawing from these case studies, three broader observations can be made about company circularity strategies for CRMs. Firstly, there are multiple, partly competing motivations that influence the adoption of circularity strategies, including cost savings, supply security, and external stakeholder pressure. Secondly, business models and value-chain structure play a major role in the implementation of circularity strategies; business-to-business models appear to be more conducive to circularity than business-to-consumer models. Finally, it is important to distinguish between closed-loop circularity, in which material flows are contained within the “focal” actor’s system boundary, and open-loop circularity, in which material flows cross the system boundary, as the latter has limited potential for mitigating material criticality from the perspective of the focal actor.

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