Consider commodities such as zinc, gold and neodymium: the so-called Critical Raw Materials (CRMs) should be one of the flywheels of the green transition, but are currently the bottleneck in the development of the innovative technologies essential for it. Dr. Benjamin Sprecher discusses an alternative view of CRM mining in the pursuit of a sustainable energy transition and circular economy in a world with ever-increasing geopolitical tensions.
The lecture ends at 13:45. It is not possible to leave the room earlier.
Copper, lithium, platinum, cobalt, and dozens of other commodities – embedded in wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, computers, displays, and devices of all kinds. They underpin key technologies driving the green transition and are also essential to a number of strategic sectors, including aerospace, net-zero industry and defence. But these critical materials have all kinds of problems. At the same time, global demand for them will only increase in the coming years. A shortage will have a major impact on the economy and increase geopolitical tensions. The biggest problem for many countries is not that the raw materials needed are running out, but where they will get them. For instance, Europe and the Netherlands strongly depend on other countries, such as China, to import them. For this reason, Trump is eying the resources of Greenland and Ukraine. Meanwhile, commercial mining organisations are also stepping up pressure to allow the extraction of CRMs in the thus far unexploited deep sea. Mining is still the most common way of extracting materials, but if we in the Netherlands and Europe want to accelerate the transition to a circular economy and sustainable energy supply, while reducing our dependency, we will have to redefine our relationship to these materials.
Benjamin Sprecher is an Assistant Professor at the Faculty of Industrial Design Engineering at Delft University of Technology. He has worked as an assistant professor at the Leiden University Institute of Environmental Sciences (CML) where he also did his PhD, and in between as a postdoc at the Yale University Center for Industrial Ecology. His main research interests are sustainable design, quantification of environmental impacts, and industrial ecology. His current work explores how the quantification of environmental impacts can inform sustainable design, and how decisions at the product design level relate to system level concepts such as circular economy. His PhD and postdoc focused on critical raw materials and supply chain resilience, and he remains working on these topics as well. In 2019, he co-wrote the report “Metal demand from electric transport”, in which the authors argue that a large-scale switch to electric cars is not possible with the current production of critical materials.
This program is part of the Green Week 2025 events (19-23 May) and is jointly organized by TU/e’s GO Green Office and Studium Generale.
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