MiNa
Wed, 11/06/2025 – 17:40
Europe simply does not have huge resources when it comes to virgin raw materials – and in the current geopolitical context, recycling less than 1% of critical raw materials is not going to be enough.
Urban mining plays a crucial role in closing the gap between what we have available and what we need. As you can see in this episode of The Road to Green, Euronews travelled to Belgium and Denmark to explore innovative circular projects that help reduce Europe’s dependence on virgin raw materials.
In Belgium, Euronews investigates how urban mining works for electronic devices. Urban mining involves finding materials in existing products, as opposed to “primary” mining which digs for them. The episode then explores a facility to see how the extracted raw materials are efficiently sorted with a view to reuse.
Euronews then travels to Denmark to sees how various actors in the construction sector – which produces 40% of waste in the EU – are innovating to boost circularity in their sector.
The Circular Economy Act is set to be adopted next year, but the European Commissioner for the Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy, Jessika Roswall told Euronews that “We have a lot of policy already: what we need is to get the economics right”.
