SusCritMOOC Online Evening Course series 2020

SusCritMOOC Online Evening Course series 2020

Evening course series on the sustainable management of critical raw materials On October 14, 15, and 16 SusCritMat held an online course series on critical raw materials. The participants gathered insights into three core topics each evening: Criticality, development of future supply and demand scenarios as well as circular product design. An additional keynote lecture on materials governance as well as business opportunities in the EIT RawMaterials Framework complemented the programme. Throughout the three evenings we had up to sixty people each night, mixed from academia and industry participating and engaging actively in the discussions.  

Material of the month: Indium

Material of the month: Indium

Indium is a very soft, ductile and malleable metal and its earth crust occurrence can be compared to the one of silver or mercury. It got its name from its indigo blue spectral line. Nowadays its main uses can be found as indium-tin oxide in flat panel devices. Other applications include alloys and solders, thin film solar panels, thermal interface materials, light emitting diodes (LEDs) and laser diodes. In transparent conducting oxides (TCOs) used in flat panels displays and in amorphous silicon and CdTe PV cells, indium can be replaced by other TCOs. There is no commercially available substitute for indium in semiconductors used in thin-film solar cells. Indium rarely […]

Material of the Month: Germanium

Material of the Month: Germanium

Germanium is a hard, brittle semimetal that first came into use a half-century ago as a semiconductor material in radar units and as the material from which the first transistor was made. Today, germanium is mainly used in electronics and solar applications, fiber-optic systems, infrared optics, polymerization catalysts, and other uses (such as chemotherapy, metallurgy, and phosphors). Germanium-containing infrared optics were primarily for military use, but the commercial applications for thermal-imaging devices that use germanium lenses have increased during the past few years. In the earth crust, germanium seldom appears in high concentrations. Due to its highly dispersive nature, it is mostly recovered as a byproduct of zinc smelting, although […]

List of Critical Raw Materials 2020 – including four new ones

List of Critical Raw Materials 2020 – including four new ones

The 2020 EU Critical Raw Materials List   The European Commission has just published the 2020 EU Critical Raw Materials List. The Commission reviews the list of critical raw materials for the EU every three years screening 83 materials. Economic importance and supply risk are the two main parameters used to determine criticality for the EU. Economic importance looks in detail at the allocation of raw materials to end-uses based on industrial applications. Supply risk looks at the country-level concentration of global production of primary raw materials and sourcing to the EU, the governance of supplier countries, including environmental aspects, the contribution of recycling (i.e. secondary raw materials), substitution, EU import […]

Material of the Month: Nickel

Material of the Month: Nickel

Nickel is one of the most common elements in the earths’ crust. Therefore, general depletion is not likely, however mining of remaining ores with reduced nickel contents, mines in disperse locations and increasing environmental regulations turn nickel mining more challenging. Due to an expected surge in global electric vehicle sales, the demand for Nickel starts to change its production, even though at present the share of battery materials is just around 3-4% of global mine production. Among all the existing Nickel containing ores, only the sulfide ones are suitable to produce battery grade Nickel. One problem concerning batteries is that the demand of Nickel to produce batteries is comparatively low, […]