Abstract
Since many years, the European Community has been monitoring some raw materials because of their high importance to the European Union economy and their high supply risk. Such raw materials, classified as critical, form a strong industrial base, producing a lot of goods and applications used in everyday life and modern technologies. Many critical raw materials are used to produce alloys and their high supply risk may constitute a serious problem for the future world economy and technological progress. Mitigating actions are therefore needed such as recycling, material efficiency improvements and, when possible, material substitution. In the present work, a systematic approach for alloy substitution in a critical raw materials perspective is developed. The method is illustrated with an example.
Highlights
Raw materials are crucial to World’s economy
In this scenario the European Union (EU) identified a series of raw materials that are critical because they are highly important to the EU economy and, at the same time, they suffer of a high supply risk
I n literature, the criticality issues linked to each raw material are quantified by a series of indexes such as the abundance risk, the sourcing and geopolitical risk, the environmental country risk, the supply risk, the economic importance and the end of life recycling input rate In order to use such indicators in design, it would be necessary to aggregate the above-mentioned indexes in an overall general indicator for each critical raw material to reach this goal
Summary
Raw materials are crucial to World’s economy. They are essential to securing a transition to green energy technologies, to securing growth and sustainable consumption and to securing access to clean and efficient consumer technologies. I n literature, the criticality issues linked to each raw material are quantified by a series of indexes such as the abundance risk, the sourcing and geopolitical risk, the environmental country risk, the supply risk, the economic importance and the end of life recycling input rate In order to use such indicators in design, it would be necessary to aggregate the above-mentioned indexes in an overall general indicator for each critical raw material to reach this goal. A higher value means a greater risk that environmental legislation may restrict supply in the future It is quantified, for an element ‘i’, by the following equation: ECRi. and HHIEPImax stays for the maximum value reached by the index HHIEPIi in the CRMs list. The economic importance of a raw material ‘i’ (EIi), is calculated as the weighted sum of the individual megasectors (expressed as gross value added), divided by the European gross domestic product (GDP) (Eqn 9) [35,37]: EI i
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