Development of educational contents on circular economy and critical raw materials challenges

Abstract

Abstract This article presents the case of three projects supported by the European Institute of Innovation and Technology EIT RawMaterials in the framework of consortium between academic and industrial partners from six European countries. EIT RawMaterials has among its strategic objectives the development of educational content for the main stakeholders in the European minerals, metals and materials sector taking into account the sustainability criteria through the value chain. First, the projects studied the need for these different contents in relation to circular economy, the challenges of Critical Raw Materials (CRM), the analysis of the environmental impacts of materials. Then, the educational contents and training were developed in a collaborative way, proposing theoretical contents but also practical and hands-on exercises. The contents were then tested during pilot workshops. Lastly, the knowledge and best practices proposed were disseminated to practitioners in the different countries of the project partners. The evaluation carried out in each project highlighted great interest from practitioners and companies for such educational contents. Online tools and interactive active learning methods were encouraged in these projects, which is considered as attractive. Shortcomings were addressed after pilot workshops which improved the content quality. © 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier B.V. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC-ND license ( http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/ ). Peer-review under responsibility of the scientific committee of the 27th CIRP Life Cycle Engineering (LCE) Conference.