Brussels, 29th November 2013: The Commission funded project “Cobalt” began yesterday its two day conference “Industry and Society’s needs for sustainable management of raw materials in Europe: Exploring solutions for future action”. The conference addresses sustainable materials management along the whole value chain and wishes to explore new innovative solutions to resource efficiency and Europe’s growth and employment.

Euromines welcomes and supports this project since the European extractive industry is one of the most important and sustainable supplier and an important stakeholder in this process.

The Europe 2020 Strategy, the Resource Efficiency Flagship as well as the Raw Materials Initiative all seek to provide new solutions to some of the most pressing economic challenges Europe is currently facing: satisfying an increasing demand for raw materials by identifying and using sustainable innovative approaches, coping with the EU’s high dependency ratio on imports of raw materials, price volatility as well as trying to find new ways of minimising the impact of market distortions.

Europe has great resource potential and the planned or ongoing mining projects represent an important pillar for Europe’s economic and industrial redevelopment along the whole value chain.

In this context, it’s EUROMINES’ strong belief that the EU-funded FP7 project – COBALT, provides for a joined debate aimed at bringing together the management of sustainable raw materials across the whole value chain into the public arena. This supports simultaneously, the main objectives of the European Innovation Partnership (EIP) on Raw Materials (RM) by acknowledging the importance of the extractive industry as a crucial stakeholder contributing to the security of raw materials supply.

For more information please contact: Veronika Sochorova (Communication Manager Euromines) sochorova@euromines.be(link sends e-mail), or visit: www.euromines.org