- Reducing the size of electric vehicle batteries by a third could cut the UK’s lithium requirement by 17%
- Government should recommit to banning single-use vapes and improve repair and recycling of electronics to reduce e-waste
The UK government should develop an integrated materials strategy to reduce demand, reuse and recycle critical materials to support the UK’s existing Net Zero Strategy and improve economic security, according to a new report by the National Engineering Policy Centre, led by the Royal Academy of Engineering.
Critical materials – as identified by the UK government – include lithium, used in batteries; and magnesium, used for producing steel alloys. The UK is economically and physically dependent on many materials that are mined around the world. Critical materials also include elements such as indium, cobalt, and niobium, and rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium. These tend to be found in very low concentrations and mining them often involves extracting vast quantities of rock or water.
The report recommends maintaining a National Materials Data Hub to monitor the sustainability of materials consumed by and in use in the UK, and enable assessment of infrastructure plans for material security and sustainability. Government should also work internationally to improve traceability and measure the global impacts of our materials’ emissions, pollution and social harms, using tools such as digital passporting.
The authors propose a new target to halve the UK’s economy-wide material footprint to help us avoid overconsumption and support the drive to reach net zero carbon emissions. Much of the infrastructure and technologies currently being used to decarbonise the economy rely on critical materials. The report recommends investing in design to reduce demand, together with more recycling facilities for machinery like wind turbines and batteries to retrieve the valuable minerals at the end of their life. Government and industry should account for material needs when planning infrastructure system transformation, to avoid locking in dependencies on scarce or unsustainable resources.
As currently designed, recovering critical materials from current products requires highly intricate processes, which are often prohibitively expensive, and a significant amount of electronic waste is disposed of to landfill, despite containing valuable materials.
Professor Joan Cordiner FREng FRSE FIChemE, Chair of the National Engineering Policy Centre Working Group on Materials and Net Zero, says:
“The way we extract and consume materials is unsustainable and we must address it urgently. Our report highlights the rising demand for critical materials, driven in part by their use in batteries, power systems and electronics. We are not the only country that will be competing for these finite minerals and we are calling on the new Government to develop a materials strategy that addresses demand and reuse of critical materials.
“For example, if we reduced the size of the UK’s larger electric vehicle batteries by 30% we could cut our lithium demand by 17% and save 75 million tonnes of rock mined for lithium by 2040 – that’s the equivalent of 19 Wembley Stadiums full of rock.”
Working Group member Mark Enzer FREng says:
“Globally, 62 million tonnes of e-waste are generated every year, and the UK produces the second highest amount of e-waste per capita. International e-Waste Day next week provides a sobering opportunity for us to reflect on the urgent need to engineer a greener future. Otherwise, the state of our environment and the supply of items like lithium-ion batteries looks bleak without more recycling and moving away from how we dispose of our old electronic devices.”
Recommendations for cutting the UK’s critical material footprint include:
- Make plans now so that new infrastructure can be disassembled and reused or recycled, through design incentives and investing in engineering capacity
- Aim to halve the UK’s overall materials footprint to drive resource efficiency
- Ensure UK energy policy accounts for critical material demands and supply risks, aiming to achieve a future system using sustainable materials with resilient supply chains, for example by reducing infrastructure needs by recommitting to the energy demand reduction target of 15% in the Net Zero Strategy
- Review and minimise critical material demands arising from e-waste produced by data centres and other digital infrastructure
- Expand and improve electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the UK to support smaller electric vehicles
- Support development of alternative technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries
- Commit to introducing the ban on single-use vapes with lithium-ion batteries in England, as proposed in January 2024
- Continue to suspend deep seabed mining and encourage other countries to do the same while supporting further research on related environmental impacts
Notes for editors
- Read the full report on Critical materials: demand-side resource efficiency measures for sustainability and resilience. The report was produced by the National Engineering Policy Centre’s Working Group on Materials and Net Zero:
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- Professor Joan Cordiner FREng FRSE FIChemE (Chair), Professor of Process Engineering at the University of Sheffield and Head of the School of Chemical, Materials and Biological Engineering
- Dr Colin Church FIMMM, CEO of the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining
- Dr Charlotte Stamper MCIWEM, Strategic Partnerships Manager at European Metals Recycling
- Professor Eileen Harkin-Jones OBE FREng FIAE FIMechE, Spirit Aerosystems-Royal Academy of Engineering Chair in Composites Engineering
- Tim Chapman FREng, Partner and Director at BCG
- Mark Enzer OBE FREng, CTO at Mott MacDonald
- Professor Mark Jolly FIMMM, Professor of Sustainable Manufacturing and Head of the Sustainable Manufacturing Systems Centre and Co-director of the EPSRC Centre for Doctoral Training in Sustainable Materials & Manufacturing
- Melissa Zanocco OBE, Capital Projects & Infrastructure Advisory at Accenture
- Dr Mike Cook FREng, Chairman of Seratech Ltd
- Rachel Stonehouse, MIMMM Head of Policy at the Institute for Materials, Minerals and Mining
- Professor Rebecca Lunn MBE FREng FRSE FICE, Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Strathclyde
- The UK’s list of critical materials are outlined in Resilience for the Future: The UK’s Critical Minerals Strategy, 2023, Department for Business and Trade and Department for Business, Energy & Industrial Strategy.
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