The Directorate-General for Enterprise and Industry at the European Commission has launched a project on the establishment of a Data Inventory for a Raw Material System Analysis (RMSA) for 21 critical raw materials and aggregates.
The project aims to build knowledge and understanding of the flow of raw materials in the EU. This will help identifying key opportunities to secure resources in the EU economy.
The scope of this project is the development of the full Material System Analysis for 22 groups of materials (21 critical raw materials and aggregates) used in the EU-28 economy.
The First Expert Workshop of this Data Inventory was held on 19th May in Brussels. A selected group of about 15 leading experts were invited, as well as representatives from the European Commission including DG JRC and DG Eurostat.
The objective of this workshop was to review the methodology and procedure for elaborating the full MSA (Material System Analysis) data inventory.
The discussion focussed on three groups of indicators:
– Group 1 – relating to current/past material flows and stocks – Group 2 – relating to policy objectives – Group 3 – relating to future supply and demand changes
The conclusions were the following:
– To focus on group 1 indicators in order to build reliable MFA for the different materials considered; – To only consider as additional information as Group 2 and group 3 indicators (as they are not always useful and/or reliable) – To not work with unreliable data and to instead rely on models in to close data gaps
The next steps will be:
– To finalize the list of indicators and the main methodological aspects of the RMSA by the end of June 2014. – To achieve the RMSA for 22 materials or groups of materials between June 2014 and May 2015. – To organize 4 expert workshops in order to provide with complementary data sources, to propose methods for filling the gaps, to validate hypothesis, calculation methods and results – To finally make recommendations on establishing and maintaining RMSA.
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