Brussels, 11h December 2024 – Dozens of activists made their voices heard on Monday’s opening of the yearly “Raw Materials Week” in Brussels, organized by the European Commission. With their vocal protest they intended to send a signal of discontent from the communities in the peripheries of Europe and in the Global South that suffer from the Commission’s plans of more mining for the energy transition.[1]

With an open letter distributed to Director Kerstin Jorna of the European Commission and to more than 400 participants attending the conference, the protestors alerted on the destructive potential of plans for metals mining and questioned the feasibility of the energy transition, as envisioned by Brussels.[2]

The letter, distributed by the Belgian NGOs CATAPA, Growth Kills, More Than Enough and Extinction Rebellion, claims that “​​a better plan for a just and sustainable transition” is needed. According to the letter’s authors, current policies for mining exponential quantities of critical metals such as lithium, nickel or copper are destructive and also infeasible, as the quantities to be mined over the next decades would exceed globally available reserves.

The letter states: “Europe’s target is to mine and process in the next 30 years as much copper as has been mined in the past 7,000 years”, while “new mines tend to create greater environmental impacts, and larger volumes of overburden, waste rock, and tailings dams.”

In the last weeks, Brussels is struggling to keep up the pace of their critical raw materials plans for the energy transition. With looming conflicts over metals supplies on the global markets and major battery projects such as Swedish Northvolt failing, the clock for a successful European race against China is ticking. Already in the last weeks, industry representatives were complaining about the delay of the Commission’s designation of strategic projects under the new Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA).

To secure more raw materials independence and mitigate future supply necks, the Commission had adopted the CRMA in early 2024. It is currently in the process of selecting projects to be designated of strategic importance in 2025. The list of applicants contains various companies also participating in the Raw Materials Week and successful candidates will benefit from fast-tracked licensing.

Already before the start of the Raw Materials Week, environmental campaign groups Friends of the Earth Europe, Amigos de la Tierra, European Environmental Bureau, and MiningWatch Portugal had delivered fact sheets and a position paper on the social and environmental issues of mining projects such as the Mina do Barroso and Mina Alberta in Portugal and Spain, or the Rovina Valley gold-copper mine in Romania to the European Commission.[3]

Lindsey Wuisan, a resource justice campaigner with Friends of the Earth Europe comments: “Green and responsible mining are a myth. If the Commission allows destructive mining projects to be fast-tracked, it will only add to the socio-ecological crisis that we are already facing today.”

The 9th edition of the Raw Materials Week in Brussels still runs until Friday the 13th of December and brings together mining companies, related researchers, and policy makers from all over the World. One focus of this year's event are also international partnerships for raw materials supply with countries such as Canada, Greenland, Australia, Brazil, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Norway, Zambia, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Serbia and South Africa.

Endnotes
[1] Protest documentation 9.12.2024: Video #1, video #2, video #3
[2] The Brussels Letter https://bit.ly/brussels-letter
[3] Position-paper and factsheets on mining projects: Mina do Barroso, Portugal; Mina Alberta, Spain; Rovina Valley Mine, Romania.