Circular economy aims at reducing value loss and avoiding waste, by circulating materials or product parts before they become waste. Today, lack of support for sharing data in a secure, quality assured, and automated way is one of the main obstacles that industry actors point to when creating new circular value networks. Together with using different terminologies and not having explicit definitions of the concepts that appear in data, this makes it very difficult to create new ecosystems of actors in Europe today. This project will address the core challenges of making decentralized data and information understandable and usable for humans as well as machines. The project will leverage open standards for semantic data interoperability in establishing a shared vocabulary (ontology network) for data documentation, as well as a decentralized digital platform that enables collaboration in a secure and privacy-preserving manner. The project addresses a number of open research problems, including the development of ontologies that need to model a wide range of different materials and products, not only providing vertical interoperability but also horizontal interoperability, for cross-industry value networks. As well as transdisciplinary research on methods to find, analyse and assess new circular value chain configurations opened up by considering resource, information, value and energy flows as an integral part of the same complex system. Three industry use cases, from radically different industry domains, act as drivers for the research and development activities, as well as test beds and demonstrators for the cross-industry applicability of the results. The developed solutions will allow for automation of planning, management, and execution of circular value networks, at a European scale, and beyond. The project thereby supports acceleration of the digital and green transitions, automating the discovery and formation of new collaborations in the circular economy.

Based on the experience and background of SCRREEN1 and SCRREEN2, the prolongation of the project SCRREEN3 will continue to develop and animate an Expert Network which will contribute to expert advice in support of decision-making at the EU level covering all the raw materials and their value chains screened in the CRMs assessment.

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.

In order to secure the sustainable access to primary and secondary raw materials and particularly Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) in the EU, there is a need for an expert advice to better understand the value chains of the raw materials screened in the CRMs assessment. Making this information freely available, through the SCRREEN knowledge database and the EC Raw Materials Information System, will support decision-making at the EU level on the CRM strategies. In the continuation of SCRREEN, SCRREEN2 will develop and strengthen the SCRREEN expert network in order to cover all raw materials screened in the CRM 2020 assessment. The work was initiated in 2019 to support the EC (validation workshop and creation of an expert database). The SCRREEN network gathers today expertise on primary and secondary resources; production, including exploration, mining, processing, recycling and refining; substitution of CRM; raw materials markets; future demand and supply; materials flows; socio-economic analysis. It covers also strategic value chains and end-use sectors, including batteries, e-mobility, renewable energy, electronics, defence and aerospace. Thanks to clustering and cooperation with other projects/initiatives, SCRREEN2 will develop this network to fill the existing gaps and to mobilize it on two axes through dedicated workshops. First, in order to improve data and knowledge on all screened raw materials, SCRREEN2 will update on a regular basis the raw materials factsheets. It will also publish sector-oriented outlook reports analysing the future supply and demand of raw materials, policy and technology gaps and innovation potential along the raw materials value chains. A work-plan, updated every 6 months, will allow SCRREEN2 to flexibly support the Commission in policy-making related to CRM in general or linked to specific applications or sectors; and to support as well the Commission in the organisation of relevant events.