Rare Earths (RE) are crucial materials for Europe's successful green and digital transition, thus classified as highly critical. The market for RE magnets itself is relatively small - about €6.5 billion - however its downstream leverage is enormous: the mobility business in the EU27 alone is expected to grow to about €500 billion by 2030, with 6 million jobs. While being a world leader in the manufacturing of e.g. electric motors, the EU27 is fully import-dependent along the entire value chain of RE magnet materials. Despite a growing market, European magnet production capacity is underutilised and tends to serve specialised niche applications. In addition, RE magnets are increasingly imported as part of motors and generator assemblies and products. The main reasons for these developments are that China has a monopoly in the RE supply chain across all stages from mining to refining. To overcome this issue, REEsilience will categorise RE for geographic locations, quantities, chemical composition, ethical and sustainable indicators, ramp-up scenarios, and pricing, considering all value streams from virgin to secondary material. It will build a production system that ensures a resilient and sustainable supply chain for RE as critical raw materials for the e-mobility, renewable energy and further strategic sectors in Europe with less dependencies on non-European economies. A newly-developed software tool will determine optimum mixing ratios to ensure consistently high product quality with maximum secondary materials for high-tech applications. Combined with new and improved technologies for alloy production and powder preparation, especially of secondary materials, the yield and stability of processes will be further enhanced, allowing further augmentation of the proportion of secondary materials in RE PM production, reducing at the same time waste, environmental damage, and consumption of energy linked with virgin production.

Polymers are one of the most used materials in different applications, especially in consumer goods like electronics, and the consumption is only expected to rise globally. In Europe, 25,8 million tonnes of plastic waste is generated annually and less than 30 % is collected for recycling and significant shares are exported from EU to be treated elsewhere. Landfilling (31 %) and incineration (39 %) of plastics is high (together 70 %), and by these treatment options the valuable materials are lost from circulation. It is estimated that 95 % of the value of plastic packaging material, between 70-105 billion EUR, is lost annually to the economy after a very short first-use cycle. The industry is lacking standards and main barriers for efficient uptake of recyclates are due to safety concerns, low quality, and recycling rates. PRIMUS activities will increase the resilience of EU's plastic value chains by securing supply of waste plastics as feedstock and increasing its availability through connecting value chain actors, developing methods to control quality, sampling, and analysis, and improving upgrading knowhow and characterize suitability towards added-value products. PRIMUS will prove legislative compliant, privacy-preserving, cost-efficient and feasible technological pathways for tapping into non-recycled or underutilized plastic waste streams. Validated business cases will lower the risks of future investments into European manufacturing capacity. PRIMUS will address one of the core challenges identified in the EU Circular Economy Action Plan, the presence of hazardous substances (brominated flame retardants) and how to effectively and safely debrominate the waste streams for new product use. PRIMUS will contribute to circulating underutilised or non-recycled streams and create further impact by supporting additional production of 0,2 Mtonnes of rHIPS, rPC/ABS, rEPDM and rTPE, which is approximately 6 % of the expected growth of European recyclate market 2018-2024.

As it is addressed by the European Plastics Strategy (European Green Deal & Circular Economy Action Plan 2.0), new methods to reliably calculate, verify and report the recycled content in products need to be developed, boosting the increase of recycled content in everyday products against the use of virgin materials. However, measuring the recycled content is complex, requiring product tracing to the production source. PRecycling aims to develop an easy-to-use methodology for sorting, sampling, tracing and recycling plastic waste streams, including detection and separation of legacy additives, along with standard analysis procedures for both plastic waste materials and recyclates (secondary raw materials) in order to produce consistently high quality, safe-to-use recyclates based on their degradation degree and added-value products with predicted lifetime. Smart tracing via digital systems will be developed in parallel, to ensure the quality and safety of reused materials, targeting a sustainable, transparent and functional Circular Economy Model for the recycling market. The environmental and financial viability of PRecycling solutions will be assessed throughout life cycle and cost analysis in order to reach competitive prices of recycled products. The above will be demonstrated, producing (I) home appliances components, (II) toys/learning resources, and (III) 100% recycled textile, starting from the same sector recyclates and different European regions. However, the proposed methodology in PRecycling could be adapted by many other sectors, i.e. packaging, vehicles, and electric/electronic equipment, triggering significant societal impact apart from commercial and industrial interest. Demonstration activities will serve as part of a community awareness initiative, showing that 'from waste to product' transformation is scalable, replicable, traceable, commercially viable and most importantly, safe to use, both within the same and new supply chain products.

Circularise offers a blockchain-based transparency solution to provide absolute proof for the circular economy, sustainability and recycling practices of manufacturers at any stage of the supply chain. Circularise enables value chain transparency without disclosure of datasets or supply chain partners. The portal uses decentralized, encrypted data to track material characteristics of products which are not distinguishable by disassembling the product, e.g. whether, and which proportion recycled materials have been employed. The system uses a virtual currency and chemical tracer to make supply chain transparency fraud-proof and certify materials. Different from paper-based information sharing which, in 65% of the cases, doesn't even go past tier 1 suppliers, the system does not require the entire supply chain to be known, cooperating, or certified. The technology decreases auditing and production costs due to a smaller number of audited parties. Validatable claims are traded directly from the material manufacturer to the brand owner no matter how far along the supply chain the manufacturer is. The resulting affordable recycled material will increase the market share of sustainable products and make them attainable for average customers. The possibility to increase revenue through circular economy business models makes it an intrinsically motivated development. The possibility to increase revenue through circular economy business models revolutionizes the sector turning it from a necessity due to external expectations to an intrinsically motivated development. The proof provided by Circularise allows monetization of the sustainability practices and creates an intrinsic motivation for circularity in our economy.

The rising demand and limited supply of critical raw materials (CRMs) impair the ability to rapidly adopt technological change toward green and sustainable technologies, which directly affect the resilience of EU industries seeking to achieve Green Deal objectives for an equitable, zero-emission, and digitalized Europe. In response to these challenges, the European Commission aims to minimize the loss of secondary raw materials (SRM) and optimize their reuse across value chains. CE-RISE will develop and pilot an integrated framework and an ensuing resource information system to identify optimal solutions for the effective reuse, recovery, and/or recycling of materials by (a) defining a set of criteria (RE criteria) to evaluate the extent to which products and embedded components can be reused, repaired, refurbished and/or recycled; (b) incorporating information on RE criteria and material composition of products into the Digital product passport (DPP) to enable traceability of materials in the supply chain; (c) integrating DPP with information on the environmental footprint of products (PEF), socio-economic and environmental (SEE) impacts of RE processes; (d) enabling confidential and anonymized information sharing among actors throughout value chains; (e) providing open-access software application to disseminate information on the assessment of RE criteria, PEF and SEE impacts of products to all stakeholders including consumers and policymakers. The results will be piloted on four case studies. CE-RISE will contribute to bridging the digital divide in society by supplying affordable second-hand ICT devices, and supporting access to digital education and job opportunities. Ultimately, CE-RISE will foster a dynamic ecosystem geared toward prolonging the use of materials in the economy and stimulating circular business models to reduce waste generation while optimizing the reuse of SRMs.