As the assessment of the criticality of a material depends on both its economic importance and its supply, Ester van der Voet from Leiden University gives insight into what factors can make a material scarce, and how the EU calculates the supply risk of materials. As current models of criticality assessment struggle to include all relevant factors, she suggests to develop a separate criticality assessment for materials from secondary sources.
Module description
The lecture contains an overview of generally taken approaches for assessing supply risk in criticality assessments, and mainly focuses on two of them: the EU criticality assessment and the criticality assessment method developed at the Center of Industrial Ecology at Yale University. It treats the aspects that are relevant for supply risk situations. It then goes on to apply those same aspects to the secondary supply of critical materials. The conclusion is that there is a great necessity to include secondary production in criticality assessment, especially if the transition towards a circular economy is taken seriously.
Learning objectives:
- Understanding which aspects are important for assessing supply risk related to individual (critical) materials
- Obtaining information on how such aspects are included, or not included, in criticality assessments
- Understanding the importance of secondary production from the point of view of criticality assessments
- Getting some starting points for thinking about including secondary production in criticality assessment
Teaching materials