New CRM tool for yearly based EU Criticality Assessment

Companies are often unaware of the implications of critical raw materials throughout the lifecycle of their products. When designing a product, no guidelines exist for the most sustainable use of materials, particularly critical raw materials. To address this, we developed a new tool that integrates available databases to assist manufacturers during the design process. The aim is to keep resources in the loop for as long as possible and prioritize product repair.
The database schema itself must be capable of overriding certain aspects of the critical raw materials dashboard. Some companies are interested in assessing the supply risk of specific materials. In such cases, the general criticality can be replaced with a value tailored to the supplier countries of the company, offering more accurate indications of criticality. This allows for a more precise evaluation of risks related to critical raw materials.
Significant effort was dedicated to reverse-engineering the methodology used by the EU, as the CRM Act proposal provides the equation but lacks detailed explanation. While CRM reports include exact values and their sources, they offer limited guidance on reproducing the calculations. Therefore, additional sources were consulted to fully understand the EU's methodology.
The new CRM tool, based on Python and PostgreSQL, is one of the outcomes of the ongoing EU Circ-Uits Project and was tested with the Company Bosch.
The data sources currently used in the CRM dashboard are as follows:
• EU CRM Reports: Data from the most recent EU criticality assessment was manually collected from the 2023 CRM report and RMIS.
• World Bank: The WGI data between 1996 and 2022 can be accessed via Excel files provided on the World Banks website
• World Mining Data: World Mining Data is published annually by the Austrian Federal Ministry of Finance (BMF). The data contains the production of raw materials per country and is easily accessible in a single Excel file containing data between 2017 and 2021
• United States Geological Survey: The USGS publishes its Mineral Commodity Summaries annually. The Summaries of 2022, 2023 and 2024 are published as Excel files containing all materials
Older Mineral Commodity Summaries are not as easily accessed. However, all Summaries between 1996 and 2024 exist as excel files for each material, but they do not offer a bulk download option.
• Eurostat/COMEXT: Eurostat provides many databases, one of which is the COMEXT database including international trade in goods (DS-045409). The dataset ‘prefs’ was selected because of its focus on extra-EU trade flows.
• SCRREEN2 : To connect CN8 Trade codes and the raw materials, data was collected manually from the Solutions for CRitical Raw materials - a European Expert Network 2 (SCRREEN2) factsheets