Communication on the 2017 list of critical raw materials for the EU

Given the continued strategic importance of raw materials for the EU manufacturing industry, the Commission is implementing a wide range of actions under the EU Raw Materials Initiative to help ensure their secure, sustainable and affordable supply. The list of critical raw materials for the EU is a central element of this Initiative.

The list should help incentivise the European production of critical raw materials through enhancing recycling activities and when necessary to facilitate the launching of new mining activities. It also allows to better understand how the security of supply of raw materials can be achieved through supply diversification, from different geographical sources via extraction, recycling or substitution.

The list of critical raw materials for the EU is subject to regular update at least every three years, in order to reflect production, market and technology developments, and the number of raw materials assessed has increased with each update.

Following the recommendations of the 2014 Report of the Ad Hoc Working Group on defining critical raw materials, this third assessment was conducted based on a refined methodology developed by the Commission, while ensuring comparability with the previous methodological approaches in 2011 and 2014. Economic importance and supply risk remain the two main parameters used to determine the criticality of a raw material.