Project duration: 1 April 2020 – 31 March 2022
Objective
IRTC-Business continues and implements the work of IRTC, an international expert group on criticality. The project will conduct Round Tables and publish their outcomes, with the goal to apply the concepts to company use. It will support industry in assessing its exposure to criticality issues and support decision-making, as well as identifying mitigation measures. A web-based tool developed by the project will support these actions.
The solution (technology)
Critical raw materials are materials that are needed for current and future products and technologies, but face now or soon a significant risk of not being sufficiently available. This can occur for a variety of reasons: e.g., because the materials are scarce in the Earth’s crust, because they are only available in specific regions, because their price is so volatile that there are periods when they are unaffordable, or because their mining and processing cause environmental or social problems. These materials often have special properties that make them important for modern applications such as electronics or new energy technologies.
IRTC-Business is an international network of experts in critical raw materials who work on definitions and assessments regarding which materials are or will be critical in the future. Because „criticality“ depends on the perspective – e.g., how scarce a material is in one’s own region, or how much of it is needed in an economy or a technological sector – these approaches differ, and industries often do not know in which regard criticality might affect their company. IRTC-Business organizes international expert meetings and publishes guidance documents on this topic and will support companies in knowing more about which materials are critical for them, and how they can manage their use of these materials.
Partnership
- The French Geological Survey, France
- EMPA – Swiss Federal Laboratories for Materials Science and Technology, Switzerland
- Fraunhofer-Gesellschaft zur Förderung der angewandten Forschung e.V. (Fraunhofer), Germany
- Ghent University, Belgium
- Granta Design Limited, United Kingdom
- Leiden University, Netherlands
- Netherlands Organisation for Applied Scientific Research, Netherlands
- Delft University of Technology, Netherlands
- Université de Bordeaux, France
- ESM Foundation (Entwicklungsfonds Seltene Metalle – Foundation for Rare Metals) (Lead Partner), Switzerland