Abstract

The pressure on resources is increasing. If current trends continue, by 2050, the global population is expected to have grown by 30% to around 9 billion. Most of people in developing and new emerging economies aspire to the welfare and consumption levels of developed countries. Owing to that intensive use of the world’s resources puts pressure on our planet and threatens the security of supply for many economies. Historical long-term demand for base-metals has steadily increased by 1-3% per annum globally and this is likely to continue between now and 2050. Access to raw materials became a matter of survival in the globalized world. When we compare mining activity since 1850 Europe has a long tradition of mining and extractive activities, but EU economy in 2007 have changed deeply [1-5]. Europe descended from self-sufficiency to high import dependence on RM. Certain materials became particularly critical because of significant economic importance for key sectors (IT, robotics, green economy) high supply risks and lack of substitutes. During the last years of XXC. fundamental changes have been observed on global markets ; 450 export restrictions on more than 400 different raw materials strategies to secure privileged access to raw materials. That explains why the EU introduced RMI in 2008 which was based on 3 major pillars.