Horizon E-Waste: Recovering Critical Raw Materials
Funds two €5M projects building the tech and the market to make recycled electronics a real source of critical raw materials for Europe.
Electronic waste is piling up fast, and a lot of what Europe needs most — rare earth elements, precious metals, and other critical raw materials — is sitting inside it, unrecovered. Europe imports most of these materials today, and mining new supply comes with real climate and environmental costs, including biodiversity loss. Getting more of them back out of old electronics, instead of digging up …
Developing and scaling collection, sorting, and recycling processes and technologies — including AI-assisted or bio-based and bio-inspired approaches where relevant — that recover strategic and critical raw materials, including individual components, from waste electrical and electronic equipment (WEEE): rare earth elements, precious metals, and other materials needed for green and digital technologies. Proposals also have to address the market side, with standards and processes that make the recovered secondary raw materials competitive on cost, quality, and purity against primary and imported material. Activities are expected to reach TRL 4-5 by the end of the project, starting from any TRL.
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