EU critical minerals supply chains are currently highly vulnerable to disruption. Biobased e-waste mining could open up new domestic sources sustainably while meeting the EU’s new needs in defense planning.
We look at the multiple advantages offered by this emerging biotechnology, which uses living organisms to recover valuable and strategic resources.
The EU’s mineral dilemma
The advent of new sectors like EVs and EV batteries presents the EU with a resource problem. Electrification and renewables require certain kinds of metals previously classed as ‘minor’, having limited industrial uses.
The elements we need to build the renewable age are referred to as ‘critical minerals’. Most major economies have varying definitions of what constitutes a critical mineral. Still, there are certain elements that different governments consistently agree are vital to their strategic interests, including lithium, cobalt, manganese, and various rare earths.
The concern is that demand for critical minerals may grow quicker than supply over the next decade, especially in the West, which has so far lagged behind geopolitical adversary China on securing supply lines.
Chinese companies already operate a large portion of the world’s critical minerals mines at incredibly low costs making it difficult for regions like the EU to catch up at scale – particularly in a manner that would be environmentally sustainable.
Moreover, the EU has limited reserves at home. To shore up its mineral supply would mean entering trade deals with mineral-rich regions, like South America or Africa.
An alternative to imports
While imports will always be vital to the EU’s resource security, boosting domestic supply of strategic minerals as far as possible is still a key concern for the bloc. Relying on external suppliers runs the risk of supply disruptions from political instability. Weaker regulatory landscapes can also mean environmentally more harmful materials.
Urban mining could offer an alternative way to boost critical minerals supply in a sustainable way. Unlike ordinary mining, it does not draw on virgin materials from natural deposits made up of rock or brine. It involves extracting valuable metals and minerals from post-consumer waste and re-using them.
A greener way to mine
The EU produces about 5 million tonnes per year of e-waste: used and discarded phones, laptops, computers, and printed circuit boards. Although they are a treasure trove of high value resources, it is still uneconomic to take apart and recycle them, partly thanks to the costs of sorting. Until urban mining capacity scales, these piles of waste will go to landfill, posing a toxic threat to ecosystems.
Urban mining can be done in several ways. Today, non-biobased hydrometallurgy and pyro-metallurgy dominate.
However, these conventional methods for extracting metals from waste are extremely toxic and energy intensive. First, they require huge volumes of acidic and basic solvents. Like many industrial processes involving synthetic chemicals, they both need very high temperatures to work, making it energy intensive and costly to operate. Third, these processes generate dust particles, toxic gases, and acid leachates that can poison waterways.
Biobased urban mining, which uses living organisms to selectively recover metals from waste – avoids many of the environmental problems that come with hydrometallurgical and pyro-metallurgical approaches. These methods are renowned among scientific researchers for their sustainability profile, requiring lower temperatures to be effective and smaller carbon footprints.
The scientific literature is full of bacteria and fungi that have been proven capable of leaching particular metals from waste. The EU has also funded several projects in the area, such as BIORECOVER and RAMINA, RUBICON, and BIOCriticalMetals. Now, years of research into urban biomining may be about to enter a new wave of commercialisation as regional independence in critical minerals looms larger than ever in EU policymaking.
The European firms driving biomining
An important recent urban biomining partnership was announced in February 2025 when Brain Biotech, a leading German biomanufacturing company, announced it was working with PX Group to develop a proof of concept for recovering gold from e-waste using biological means.
One of Brain Biotech’s previous projects was to develop a mobile pilot plant for bioleaching gold from waste using microbes. The unit, called BioXtractor, was developed and tested with the help of PX Group a few years back. Their latest partnership with PX Group will test the performance of the mobile bio-mining unit at a larger scale.
There are several types of biomining and bioleaching is currently the most common in the commercial space. This is the type that Brain Biotech deploys. Bioleaching uses living microbes to extract metals from e-waste. Specifically, it relies on the chemical compounds excreted by these microbes as they metabolise to dissolve the metals and make them easier to recover.
Europe has a couple of other companies offering biobased urban mining tools. BiotaTec based in Estonia, founded in 2007, offers biomining tech for making critical raw materials more available in industrial waste, including e-waste. In the UK, N2s offers services in recovering metals from e-waste using bioleaching.
Further afield, New Zealand’s Mint Innovation is another biobased urban mining startup focused on recovering both precious metals like gold and critical minerals.
Apart from microbes, scientists have long investigated fungi as a potential tool for metal recovery. However, fungal biomining tools are even less scaled than microbial pathways thanks to the slow growth rates of candidate species and the high costs of growth media.
Meeting mineral targets sustainably
Urban mining is still in its early stages and biobased methods in particular are still an emerging technology. Yet a changing geopolitical landscape is now, more than ever, providing impetus for more EU investment and policies targeted at scaling this low-impact mining technology.
Brain Biotech and PX Group’s biomining project was announced just before the 2025 Munich Security Conference, where EU and world leaders meet annually to discuss international security challenges.
Critical minerals were top of the agenda and there were sustained references to recycling as a crucial way for resource-poor Europe to secure them. During the conference, the European Commissioner for Environment Jessika Roswall stated that less than 1% of the critical raw materials in use comes from recycling. She urged the EU to close the mineral loop and keep valuable materials in circulation.
Roswell promised the Munich Security Conference that she would prioritise a competitive circular economy for critical minerals under the recently implemented Clean Industrial Deal.
Recycling metals from waste meets a key EU economic and foreign policy aim of the post-COVID years: diversification. Diversification means expanding the range of critical raw materials suppliers that the EU sources from. This aims to prevent import dependencies, especially on geopolitical rivals like China and Russia. Biobased methods speak directly to this need, offering the most environmentally sound way of scaling a European urban mining industry that reduces the bloc’s reliance on third countries to access the materials it needs.
Recycling in general is already important in existing EU policy on achieving resource independence. The bloc’s 2023 Critical Raw Material Act, written to wean the EU off China and other external suppliers, set a bloc-wide target that a quarter of the EU’s annual consumption in critical minerals should come from recycling by 2030.
The EU’s Critical Raw Materials Act was followed up by the 2025 Clean Industrial Act, which places similar emphasis on recycling key raw materials to, as far as possible, onshore the production of minerals and metals.
The defence dimension
Biotech for urban mining meets many of the EU’s current policy priorities. It is one of the only ways that the EU can boost its domestic production of critical minerals in a way that is environmentally sustainable. There are also clear economic benefits to deploying biobased methods for urban mining.
It also serves a relatively new policy priority: building out its regional defence capacity. The 2025 Munich Security Conference was a historic moment for Europe as US Vice President JD Vance told delegates that the EU could no longer rely on his country for security guarantees.
In response, Germany and France are now calling for EU cooperation in increasing its own defence production. With many critical minerals having both renewable and defence applications, the push to build Europe’s military capacity will no doubt give a boost to urban mining projects.
Yet the industry will still need clear backing from the EU to make the leap from small-scale production. Consistent policy is needed in the form of targets backed by financial incentives for companies to procure and produce recycled and low-carbon critical minerals.
