Reduce demand and recycle critical materials like lithium

Critical materials – as identified by the UK government – include lithium, used in batteries; and magnesium, used for producing steel alloys. The UK is economically and physically dependent on many materials that are mined around the world. Critical materials also include elements such as indium, cobalt, and niobium, and rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium. These tend to be found in very low concentrations and mining them often involves extracting vast quantities of rock or water.

The report recommends maintaining a National Materials Data Hub to monitor the sustainability of materials consumed by and in use in the UK, and enable assessment of infrastructure plans for material security and sustainability. Government should also work internationally to improve traceability and measure the global impacts of our materials’ emissions, pollution and social harms, using tools such as digital passporting.

The authors propose a new target to halve the UK’s economy-wide material footprint to help us avoid overconsumption and support the drive to reach net zero carbon emissions. Much of the infrastructure and technologies currently being used to decarbonise the economy rely on critical materials. The report recommends investing in design to reduce demand, together with more recycling facilities for machinery like wind turbines and batteries to retrieve the valuable minerals at the end of their life. Government and industry should account for material needs when planning infrastructure system transformation, to avoid locking in dependencies on scarce or unsustainable resources.

As currently designed, recovering critical materials from current products requires highly intricate processes, which are often prohibitively expensive, and a significant amount of electronic waste is disposed of to landfill, despite containing valuable materials. 

Professor Joan Cordiner FREng FRSE FIChemE, Chair of the National Engineering Policy Centre Working Group on Materials and Net Zero, says: “The way we extract and consume materials is unsustainable and we must address it urgently. Our report highlights the rising demand for critical materials, driven in part by their use in batteries, power systems, and electronics. We are not the only country that will be competing for these finite minerals and we are calling on the new Government to develop a materials strategy that addresses demand and reuse of critical materials.

“For example, if we reduced the size of the UK’s larger electric vehicle batteries by 30% we could cut our lithium demand by 17% and save 75 million tonnes of rock mined for lithium by 2040 – that’s the equivalent of 19 Wembley Stadiums full of rock.”

Working Group member Mark Enzer FREng says: “Globally, 62 million tonnes of e-waste are generated every year, and the UK produces the second highest amount of e-waste per capita. International e-Waste Day next week provides a sobering opportunity for us to reflect on the urgent need to engineer a greener future. Otherwise, the state of our environment and the supply of items like lithium-ion batteries looks bleak without more recycling and moving away from how we dispose of our old electronic devices.”

Recommendations for cutting the UK’s critical material footprint include:

• Make plans now so that new infrastructure can be disassembled and reused or recycled, through design incentives and investing in engineering capacity
• Aim to halve the UK’s overall materials footprint to drive resource efficiency
• Ensure UK energy policy accounts for critical material demands and supply risks, aiming to achieve a future system using sustainable materials with resilient supply chains, for example by reducing infrastructure needs by recommitting to the energy demand reduction target of 15% in the Net Zero Strategy
• Review and minimise critical material demands arising from e-waste produced by data centres and other digital infrastructure
• Expand and improve electric vehicle charging infrastructure across the UK to support smaller electric vehicles
• Support development of alternative technologies, such as sodium-ion batteries
• Commit to introducing the ban on single-use vapes with lithium-ion batteries in England, as proposed in January 2024
• Continue to suspend deep seabed mining and encourage other countries to do the same while supporting further research on related environmental impacts