MAGELLAN will, for the first time in Europe, create a direct collaboration between material scientists, designers, manufacturers, recyclers and end-users, to engineer and demonstrate at TRL7, a disruptive, sustainable and cost-effective rare-earth-element (REE) permanent magnet (PM) value chain solution for high volume electric vehicle traction motors (EVTM), including: 1) Engineering and demonstration at TRL7 of an integrated highly advanced recycling and manufacturing process for improved resource efficiency short-loop recycling based on magnet-to-alloy, neodymium substitution and functionally shaped PM manufacturing via Powder Injection Moulding. 2) Development of a new EVTM rotor design benefitting from advanced shaped PM to improve assembly, enhance motor performances and facilitate dismantling of End-of-Life motors resulting in improved cost effectiveness and reduced material loss during recycling. 3) Optimisation of magnet recovery and recycling to avoid downcycling by minimising dispersion and dilution of heavy REE; implementation of characterisation and decision protocols to orient recovered magnets to the most suitable recycling route; supporting standardised magnet labelling. MAGELLAN will demonstrate the TRL of highly recyclable PM prototypes in an EVTM within a representative operating environment. Sustainability and business benefits will be demonstrated through life-cycle analysis. The future industrialisation of the MAGELLAN solution is estimated to reach a production of up to 2000t/y, i.e. 10-12% of the expected European EVTM market in 2040 and 4% of the expected European PM market in 2040 including all end-user sectors, thus significantly contributing to improving responsible supply of raw materials to Europe. It will potentially generate hundreds of new jobs in Europe, in PM manufacturing, recycling and REE industry, and contribute to a reduction of PM CO2 emissions of up to 50% when compared with standard magnet manufacturing processes.

The CROCODILE project will showcase innovative metallurgical systems based on advanced pyro-, hydro-, bio-, iono- and electrometallurgy technologies for the recovery of cobalt and the production of cobalt metal and upstream products from a wide variety of secondary and primary European resources. CROCODILE will demonstrate the synergetic approaches and the integration of the innovative metallurgical systems within existing recovery processes of cobalt from primary and secondary sources at different locations in Europe, to enhance their efficiency, improve their economic and environmental values, and will provide a zero-waste strategy for important waste streams rich in cobalt such as batteries. Additionally, CROCODILE will produce a first of a kind economically and environmentally viable mobile commercial metallurgical system based on advanced hydrometallurgical and electrochemical technologies able to produce cobalt metal from black mass containing cobalt from different sources of waste streams such as spent batteries and catalysts. The new established value chain in this project will bring together for the first time major players who have the potential of supplying 10,000 ton of cobalt annually in the mid-term range from European resources, corresponding to about 65% of the current overall EU industrial demand. Therefore, the project will reduce drastically the very high supply risk of cobalt for Europe, provide SMEs with novel business opportunities, and consolidate the business of large refineries with economically and environmentally friendly technologies and decouple their business from currently unstable supply of feedstocks.

PolyMethylMethAcrylate (PMMA) is a well-established polymer for its optical properties. Although PMMA can be turned back into its monomer, the technology has limited applications. Currently what is collected and reprocessed are mostly production scraps, which is about 10 % of the annual PMMA production but a much larger amount of recyclable product is available. On a world scale basis, 10 % of post-industrial scraps and the equivalent of 10 % of post-consumer products represent a potential of a Billion € market. The MMAtwo project main objective is to construct a novel and fast growing PMMA recycling value chain through depolymerization and recovery of a monomer grade sold at 90 % of virgin MMA price. MMAtwo targets to reduce the energy needs by more than 70 % and the CO2 emissions by more than 60 %. To achieve its objective, MMAtwo integrates representative players along the value chain. During the project, PMMA will be collected from production scraps, but also from End-of-Life vehicles, Electronics goods, construction…. The lead-free depolymerization process will be validated at TRL7 enabling the possibility of a first commercial unit soon after the end of the project. A versatile purification process will be validated through repolymerization of the produced monomer. MMA grades produced will be validated in several optical and non-optical applications. The inorganic fractions from PMMA composites will also be valorized. The project will establish standards for post-consumer and post-production PMMA based products in order to facilitate the recycling. Training and education activities will be organized in order to prepare the next generation of Engineers and Researchers in the field of closed-loop polymer recycling. The new value chain will benefit to the entire PMMA industry, as post-production and post-consumer products will be collected and processed by and independent company servicing the major PMMA producers and their customers.

The general objective of Project RESiLEX is to demonstrate 7 industry-driven technological and business innovative solutions covering the full Silicon value chain in order to contribute to improving the resilience and sustainability of this critical raw material value chain in Europe. RESiLEX (Resilient Enhancement for the Silicon Industry Leveraging the European matriX) will assess the economical, social and environmental impact of these solutions and identify, roadmap, provide open source policy-making recommendations to accelerate the replication of the ones with the highest potential, while also addressing transversal challenges from the European mining industry as a whole with a 8th pilot transversal demonstration.

Europe is on the need of Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) to secure its green energy transition and achieve climate neutrality by 2050. PV panels for clean energy generation, and batteries for energy storage are key components for the green energy transition but heavily depending on CRMs. However, as the PV and EV markets were developing fast in the last decade in Europe, significant amount of secondary EV batteries, and PV panels will be available for recycling. Traditional approaches that have been used so far for their recycling are focused on materials recovery, and less on the enormous potential for reuse in second life before recycling. Additionally, proposed recycling processes so far are still suffering from several issues related to purity and efficiency of the processes as well as high cost and environmental aspects. The overarching aim of the SOLMATE project is to set up solid foundations of a new industrial value chain for the sustainable reuse and recycling of PV solar panels and EV batteries in interesting emerging markets and high added value applications. The main objectives of SOLMATE are on one hand i) to develop and demonstrate viable and guaranteed low-cost decentralised energy systems for different emerging markets and business cases based on the reuse of batteries from EoL EV and used PV solar panels (i.e., repowering from PV farms), and on the other hand, ii) to demonstrate low cost and environmentally friendly technologies for improving the purity and increasing the recovery of raw materials (especially critical raw materials) from EoL EV batteries and PV that cannot be reused. SOLMATE is designed to be fully aligned with the waste hierarchy principles as indicated in the Waste Framework Directive (Prevention, Reuse, Recycling, Recovery, Disposal).