Title page

Contents

Foreword 4

List of Abbreviations 6

What is EGRM and the RMYMG? 7

Introduction 9

Understanding the Global Critical Minerals Lifecycle: Environmental, Social, and Economic Opportunities and Impacts for Sustainable Development 11

What is a Value Chain? 11

Exploration and Project Development 12

Production: Extraction, Processing, and Refining 13

Significance of the Geographic Concentration of Mineral Supply Chains 14

Deep-Sea Mining 16

Manufacturing 17

What Makes Critical Minerals "Critical"? 18

End-of-Life: The Challenge of Waste and the Need for Circularity 22

Circular Economy 23

Towards a Globally-Aligned Resource Management Standard: The United Nations Framework Classification for Resources and the United Nations... 30

Why Do We Need Interoperable Resource Management Standards? 30

Case Study in UNFC/UNRMS Implementation 36

Conclusion 38

Annex I 40

Figure 1. An overview of the critical minerals value chain 12

Figure 2. Countries accounting for largest share of critical raw materials 14

Figure 3. Circular Economy Systems, the technical cycle 23

Figure 4. Waste Management Hierarchy, which illustrates that the more upstream the waste elimination and metal-bearing materials concentration,... 24

Figure 5. Geographic concentration of battery recycling capacities 27

Figure 6. UNFC use by the different stakeholder groups 31

Figure 7. Full version of UNFC with main classes 33

Figure 8. Roadmap to securing mineral supply using UNFC 34

Figure 9. Schematic connection of UNRMS to UNFC and project-level implementation 35