- Funding Programme
- Year
- 2022
Roadmap for a future Comprehensive Raw Material Balance
Both Austria and the EU face critical dependencies on imported raw materials vital for strategic sectors like renewable energy, digital technologies, and defence. The lack of detailed knowledge about raw material transformation and recycling along the value chain poses challenges for ensuring a secure supply.
To address this problem, a roadmap for a comprehensive raw material balance is developed. This roadmap, part of the Master Plan Raw Materials 2030, aims to establish strategies, data collection methods, and action plans for creating a comprehensive raw material balance. It seeks to integrate primary and secondary resource flows and stocks to support sustainable resource management. The roadmap focuses on identifying data sources, addressing data gaps, ensuring data confidentiality, and presenting scenarios for predicting supply bottlenecks. Additionally, it outlines legal, technical, and administrative measures necessary for improving data quality and transparency.
The goal is to create a cross-stakeholder planning tool and establish a national resource accounting department to facilitate routine implementation of these strategies.
Context
The project addressed critical challenges faced by Austria and the EU regarding their reliance on imported raw materials, essential for pivotal sectors like renewable energy, electric mobility, defence and aerospace, and digital technologies. This reliance makes Austrian and EU economies highly exposed to vulnerabilities along the supply chain.
The project is linked to EU policy priorities such as the Green and Digital Transformation. It aims to develop a comprehensive raw material balance as part of the Master Plan Raw Materials 2030. Possible challenges across the project rollout include gaps in data availability, confidentiality issues, and the complexity of integrating primary and secondary resource flows.
Support Delivered
The Austrian Master Plan for Raw Materials 2030 lays the foundation for a secure and sustainable supply of raw materials and resilient development in Austria. For the implementation of the "Establishment of a raw material accounting system in Austria" in the Master Plan Raw Materials 2030, the elaboration of a roadmap is essential. This roadmap should especially:
- identify the scientific methods and the data base;
- establish and analyse/exploit balance sheets for control/design measures,
- present benefits of routine accounting (e.g., identification of systematic data errors; knowledge gain),
- present exemplary scenarios of the derivation and prediction possibilities of supply bottlenecks;
- identify legal, technical, and administrative measures to improve the data,
- estimate the costs of the comprehensive raw material balance as well as
- present the scalability to include the data of all European Member States.
Expected results
Implementing the roadmap under the Austrian Master Plan for Raw Materials 2030 will enable the development of a comprehensive raw material balance along the following lines:
- Completion of material flow analysis
- Proposal and implementation of further legal, technical and administrative measures in order to improve security of sustainable supply with raw materials, in order to obtain our goals set in energy, climate, environmental and industrial policy connected to the use of raw materials.
In parallel to the indicated technical specifications, the roadmap will deliver at its core an action plan with policy recommendations. These recommendations will be subject to political consultation and, following a stakeholder assessment, will be forwarded for implementation within the Master Plan Raw Materials 2030 at the interface with an upcoming circular economy strategy.
More about the project
You can read the documents related to the project here: