The Road to Green 17: Urban mining – turning waste into strategic resources

Europe is poor in raw materials. In the current geopolitical context, we can’t continue to recycle less than 1% of critical raw materials. In this episode Euronews travels to Belgium and Denmark to explore innovative projects that help to reduce this dependence on raw materials, thanks to the circular economy.  

In Belgium, Euronews investigates how “urban mining” works in practice for electronic devices. This practice involves finding materials in existing products, as opposed to "primary" mining where ground resources are exploited. We then explore a facility using AI to see how the extracted raw materials are efficiently sorted to be reused.  

Before the adoption of the Circular Economy Act next year, European Commissioner for the Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy Jessika Roswall told Euronews that “We have a lot of policy already, what we need is to get the economics right”.  

Euronews then travels to Denmark to explore how various actors in the construction sector – which produces 40% of waste in the EU - are innovating to boost circularity in their sector.  

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DG ENV co-finances the production of the Road to Green, while Euronews retain full editorial independence. Views and opinions expressed in the programme are solely those of the speakers and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of the European Commission or any other entities.