Rare Earths ESCo: towards more responsible use of rare earths throughout their life cycle: what are the future prospects in terms of sobriety, recycling and production methods?
Rare earths are metals that are of crucial interest for France. Their supply is a vital issue on many levels - industrial, technological, geopolitical, economic, environmental and health-related. The Rare Earths Collective Scientific Expertise (ESCo) is a CNRS initiative that aims to establish the state of scientific knowledge on the use of rare earths throughout their life cycle through study of sobriety and recycling practices along with changes to extraction and production methods.
Particular attention is being paid to rare earth elements (REEs) in the current international context of industrial supply being under pressure. Such metals possess unique properties that make them key assets in many fields, including renewable energies, e-mobility, medical imaging or chemical catalysis, to name just a few. Government and industry are currently calling for a new REE strategy for several reasons. On one hand, strong annual growth in demand is leading to increased dependence on primary deposits while on the other, there are of course issues linked to the environmental impact and strong negative externalities associated with their extraction and processing and, finally, to the inherent geopolitical risks of the current situation featuring almost exclusive Chinese production and processing.
The expertise report on rare earths carried out by the CNRS's Mission for Scientific Expertise (MPES) aims to establish the state of current scientific literature on the issues and opportunities linked to more responsible usage of rare earths. The report will eschew taking the question of reserves as its starting point and instead will provide a comprehensive multidisciplinary overview of the current and future uses of REEs. It will also survey scientific knowledge in three main areas:
- reducing use, including discussions of possible substitutions of REEs and their usages;
- recycling, particularly through 'urban mining';
- producing REEs differently by exploring more environmentally-friendly approaches and alternative supply sources like waste from mining of other minerals.
The ESCo will advise whether knowledge of uses of other strategic and critical metals can be transposed to REEs and in which conditions.
The CNRS will ensure the relevant principles of competence, independence, impartiality and transparency are respected in this collective expert scientific review.
A multidisciplinary group of scientific experts will work on a corpus of several thousand references and aims to complete the expert review in the last quarter of 2025.
Photo credit : © Cyril FRESILLON / Mecaware / CNRS Images
