MATERIAL FLOW ANALYSIS FOR IDENTIFYING RARE EARTH ELEMENT RECYCLING POTENTIALS IN THE EU-27

Rare earth elements (REEs) are essential for high-techology industrial sectors. This paper presents research on material flow analysis (MFA) applied to REEs in the EU-27. Innovative aspects of this research pertain to (i) considering potential lithospheric stocks of REEs in the EU and (ii) accounting for incomplete and imprecise information in MFA data reconciliation. Results obtained to-date provides a history of EU-27 raw rare earth imports and exports and a methodology for data reconciliation which constitutes an alternative to the classical least-squares method.

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