How Europe's legislating to ensure clean supplies for the energy transition

The European Union is working on a Critical Raw Material Act designed to ensure raw materials for the energy transition come from environmentally-friendly sources.

Alan Parte, the vice-president of lithium projects at Imerys, talks us through the details:

"The Critical Raw Material Act that's being elaborated by Europe is an essential element to ensure the supply of the sector, especially of batteries for electric vehicles and the energy transition.

It is essential to ensure that the context is also favourable for the development of local projects and that we are as demanding on the sources of raw materials as they arrive from around the world, if they are sourced in Australia, China and South America, that the rules of the game, particularly in terms of responsible mining, are applied and are extremely demanding in terms of European standards and norms on all of its supplies.

We have made very strong choices since the beginning of the project. For example, the fact of being an underground mine in order to limit the environmental impact on biodiversity, noise and dust. And we are also going to limit our water consumption as much as possible in the development of our process."