Henrike Hahn, MEP (Greens/EFA), Deputy speaker of the German Delegation, Industrial Policy Spokesperson of the European Group, and the Green Shadow Rapporteur on the Critical Raw Materials Act comments on the Amendments that she has submitted to the ITRE committee yesterday:

“The CRMA is intended to help ensure the supply of critical raw materials that we need for green technologies and in the space and defense sectors in Europe. Critical Raw Materials are essential for a Green competitive and sustainable European industry. The Critical Raw Materials Act is intended to help to ensure the need for critical raw materials in Europe under the highest possible ecological and social criteria and to diversify supply chains. At the same time we also have to create incentives to reduce the use of critical raw materials and to promote reuse and recycling. The acceleration of approval procedures must not result in ecological and social standards being undermined and mining in protected areas like Natura 2000 has to be a taboo.”

 

Henrike Hahn, MEP comments her CRMA amendments:

“With my Amendments I hope to increase the overall ambition of the Critical Raw Materials Act. I have therefore submitted a batch of amendments on the recycling benchmark designed towards an objective of fully circular economy. In my view, Union recycling capacity should be able to process 70% of the Strategic Raw materials present in waste. With regard to the benchmark for self-sufficiency instead of extraction, I am not changing the figure of 10% but I specify that extraction and recycling should enable to cover 10% of the consumption of strategic raw materials.

I have also included a slightly reinforced objective of diversification of supply chain, by intending to diversify EU imports as long as it is more concentrated than the global average. Finally, I propose to include a benchmark to mitigate the expected growth in demand for CRMs by reducing the consumption by 70% compared to a baseline scenario.  

Concerning the permitting for strategic projects, I propose 36 months for extraction, except if it is extraction from extractive waste, it could be 24 months, and no change to the 12 months for recycling and processing.  I also explicitly delete the possible overriding public interest of strategic projects. This overriding public interest could facilitate the establishment of Strategic Projects in Natura 2000 areas. Mining in European protected areas such as Natura 2000 must remain a taboo.

I have also introduced amendments aimed at narrowing down of the economic activities that could benefit from strategic stocks. In my view, strategic stocks should only relate to essential goods or to the maintenance of vital societal functions or economic activities.

I have furthermore reinforced the assessment criteria of the Strategic Projects with social and environmental risk categories applying the list from the Batteries Regulation.

Finally, I have also reinforced provisions to support local and affected communities, in particular indigenous communities, and for the inclusion of public participation."

 

I am at your disposal for further questions.