An engineering think-tank has called on the government to implement a “comprehensive and robust” strategy for managing the country’s continuing access to rare and critical materials, including those used in emerging green technologies.
The National Engineering Policy Centre (NEPC) is calling for more action to be taken to reduce demand and reuse and recycle critical resources so as better to align with the country’s net zero ambitions and enhance economic security.
Its report, Critical Materials: Reducing Demand and Ensuring Sustainability, has highlighted the UK’s dependence on essential resources, such as lithium for batteries and magnesium for steel manufacturing.
Materials such as lithium, magnesium, indium, cobalt, and niobium, as well as rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium, are all critical for our future growth and prosperity.
These have a wide range of uses, for example in electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, data centres and digital consumer items such as telephones and computers.
However, the NEPC has highlighted that recent supply chain disruptions have raised significant concerns about the escalating worldwide demand for these essential resources.
“The UK is economically and physically dependent on many of these critical materials. Recent supply chain crises have driven increasing concern about the growing need for critical materials,” it said.
“Vulnerability to supply chain crises is not only an economic threat but also challenges the capacity of the UK to achieve the infrastructure transformation required to reach net zero.
“Expansion of demand for critical materials also comes with environmental and social harms associated with their extraction and processing that would work against global goals of mitigating climate change and of a just transition to net zero. These impacts are often not visible to the public or decision-makers,” it added.
The full report can be viewed on the Royal Academy of Engineering website
An electric vehicle being charged; EV batteries use scarce rare earth materials Image: Pexels
