Europe will extract copper, cobalt and rare earths from e-scooters and dishwashers

The CIRCUIT4EU project, funded with €8.9 million by the European Union, aims to prove that circuit boards, magnets and household electronic components can become a reliable source of critical minerals — without opening a new mine.

The European Union has kicked off CIRCUIT4EU, a project to recover critical minerals from consumer electronics, with a total budget of €8.9 million — more than €7.7 million of which comes from the Horizon Europe research and innovation program. The project runs from June 2026 to November 2029, is coordinated by ENSAM (Arts et Métiers) in France, and brings together 21 partners from nine countries, including companies, research institutes, producer responsibility organizations, standardization bodies and the WEEE Forum, a European reference in electronic waste. The focus is on nine of the 34 critical minerals listed by the European Union — copper, cobalt, nickel, antimony, tantalum, boron and rare earth elements — all present in relevant concentrations in printed circuit boards, permanent magnets and electronic components. To test the solutions under near-real conditions, the consortium chose four product categories as pilots: laptops, Wi-Fi routers, e-scooters and dishwashers.

The choice of these four products is not arbitrary — they represent categories with high disposal volumes, collection streams already partially established in Europe and known concentrations of the target minerals, which allows the consortium to test technology at realistic scale without relying on hypothetical material flows. The project will take ten technologies to technology readiness level 7 (TRL 7), the second-to-last step before full commercial scale. Two of them stand out for the kind of bottleneck they solve. The first is the combination of robotic disassembly with automated desoldering — today, most electronics disassembly for material recovery is still manual, slow and expensive, which limits the volume any recycler can process per day; automating this step is what separates artisanal recycling from industrial recycling. The second is the Digital Product Passport, a digital record that accompanies each product and describes its material composition — without this information, whoever takes apart a laptop or a dishwasher today simply does not know precisely how much cobalt or tantalum that specific device contains, which forces them to treat each unit as an unknown. Hydrometallurgical recycling comes after disassembly to extract high-purity metals from the already separated components, and AI-based quality inspection acts as a final check, identifying contamination before the material moves on to industrial reuse. The consortium's stated goal — moving from a chain dependent on virgin ore to a market in which remanufacturers and recyclers see in real time where recyclable critical minerals are and can order high-value components on demand — describes, in practice, an attempt to treat the stock of electronics already in circulation in Europe as a parallel mineral reserve, only without mining costs, without geological risk and, potentially, faster to access than opening a new mine.

For ESG and supply chain management professionals, CIRCUIT4EU documents a change in the status of critical minerals recycling: it has gone from a niche environmental topic to a supply security strategy, competing for the same industrial demand that primary mining supplies today. For materials engineers and metallurgists, the project opens a career front that combines skills that rarely went together — robotic disassembly, digital product traceability and hydrometallurgy — within a single recovery flow. And for mining companies that supply copper, cobalt, nickel or rare earths to the European market, the message is direct: secondary supply, coming from electronics recycling, is set to grow as a source competing with primary supply as the European Union expands its Critical Raw Materials Act — which means part of future demand for new ore may be absorbed by material already circulating within Europe itself, in drawers and in e-waste not yet processed.