What are critical minerals, how are they used and why do they matter?
The UK government identifies materials such as lithium, magnesium, indium, cobalt, and niobium, as well as rare earth elements such as neodymium and praseodymium as critical.
These have a wide range of uses, for example in ceramics, metallurgy, electric vehicle batteries, wind turbines, data centres and digital consumer items like telephones and computers.
Our reports
Report: Windfall
The recovery and remanufacturing of neodymium magnets from UK wind turbines
Report: Demand and sustainability
Critical materials: Reducing demand and ensuring sustainability
What makes a material critical?
Materials are named as 'critical' when their anticipated uses go beyond the expected available supplies. Some examples of reasons why supplies can be limited:
- they are less valuable by-products of other mining activities
- their trade may be particularly subject to geopolitics due to geographical concentration
- they are difficult and environmentally damaging to extract.
The UK is economically and physically dependent on many of these critical materials. Recent supply chain crises have driven increasing concern about the growing need for critical materials. Vulnerability to supply chain crises is not only an economic threat but also challenges the capacity of the UK to achieve the infrastructure transformation required to reach net zero. Expansion of demand for critical materials also comes with environmental and social harms associated with their extraction and processing that would work against global goals of mitigating climate change and of a just transition to net zero. These impacts are often not visible to the public or decision-makers.