National Circular Economy Strategy (NKWS)

The draft of Germany's National Circular Economy Strategy (Nationale Kreislaufwirtschaftsstrategie - NKWS) was published on 18 June 2024. As of September 2024, the NKWS has been announced but is not yet in force. It is part of ongoing national and European-level projects and regulations aimed at promoting circular economy principles.

Key Provisions on Recycling and Critical Minerals:

1. Design for Recycling: The strategy emphasises the importance of designing products to enable functional, high-quality recycling of metals and other materials. This includes ensuring that composite materials can be dismantled and separated.
2. Knowledge Base Development: The NKWS aims to improve information availability on material flows, alloy types, and chemical compositions. This knowledge will help recyclers optimise their offerings based on forecasts of future metal demands and quality requirements.
3. Technical Optimisation: The strategy calls for the development of digitally supported analysis, sorting, pre-treatment, and processing facilities, as well as associated recycling systems for all relevant metals.
4. Economic Viability: The NKWS seeks to create suitable framework conditions to make high-quality recovery economically viable, even for metals used in small quantities or dispersed spatial distributions.
5. Metal Recovery from Slag: The strategy emphasises the importance of recovering metals such as aluminium, stainless steel, and brass from waste incineration plant slag to meet demand.
6. Alignment with EU Regulations: The NKWS takes into account new EU regulations, such as the Battery Regulation (EU) 2023/1542, which sets minimum targets for recycling and recycled material use quotas for certain metals in batteries.
7. National Urban Mining Strategy: As part of the NKWS implementation, the Federal Environment Agency is developing a National Urban Mining Strategy by 2026, focusing on exploring, developing, and mining metals from anthropogenic deposits.
8. Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA): The strategy aligns with the EU's law on the sustainable supply of critical raw materials, passed in March 2024.

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