Advancing the Circular Economy of Critical Materials

Clean energy technologies, which aim to reduce environmental impacts from production and consumption, are gaining traction in an era of ever-increasing environmental awareness. As industries around the globe transition to more environmentally friendly approaches, a greater emphasis has been placed on critical materials (especially rare earth elements) that provide essential and specialized properties to help realize clean energy products or systems (e.g., electric vehicles and wind turbines). Due to increasing demand and substantial supply risks, the market volatility of critical materials (such as price fluctuations and spikes) has been aggravated in recent decades. To mitigate supply uncertainties for emerging clean energy technologies, a transition from the conventional linear economy (take-make-dispose) to a circular economy (CE) is expected to play a vital role. In this context, a circular economy considers end-of-life products and manufacturing waste streams as potential resource flows, from which material value may be extracted to create "new" products. To support the basic science needs and provide decision-making insights for the nascent circular economy technologies being developed, growing attention has been drawn to crosscutting research. Crosscutting research develops theoretical, computational, and experimental methods that are necessary to gain a comprehensive understanding of the CE technologies under development, so as to identify improvement opportunities and facilitate their industrial implementation. In a market-driven society, techno-economic assessment (TEA) is gaining prominence in the domain of crosscutting research. The objective of TEA is to evaluate the technical viability and economic feasibility of a technology or system. Through production cost-benefit modeling and financial analysis, TEA can assist in making more economically informed decisions regarding process designs and facilitating the commercialization of more CE approaches. In an effort to accelerate the clean energy ...