On 22 May 2026, European Commissioner for Environment, Water Resilience and a Competitive Circular Economy Jessika Roswall told the GLOBSEC Forum that Europe must treat waste as a strategic resource to break dependencies on external suppliers for critical raw materials, framing circularity as a security imperative. In a side session titled "From Scrap to Shield," Roswall argued that high-value recycling of metals, batteries and permanent magnets can reduce vulnerabilities exposed by past energy dependence, but warned that secondary materials must meet defence-grade standards to be trusted in sensitive applications.
securing access to feedstock through better collection and sorting; building quality and trust via standards and traceability; creating demand certainty through public procurement, including defence procurement; and scaling up investment in technologies such as AI-enabled recovery and tailings valorisation. She stressed that public-private cooperation across the value chain is essential.
The speech contained concrete proposals, including the upcoming Circular Economy Act to be presented in autumn 2026, which aims to make the Single Market work better for circular products and secondary raw materials by reducing fragmentation and strengthening the business case. Roswall also referenced the RESourceEU strategy as part of building a more secure industrial base.
The speech shifts EU policy towards treating circular economy measures as tools for strategic autonomy and security, not just environmental protection. It advocates for stronger regulatory intervention to keep valuable materials in the European economy, including possible controls on waste exports and mandatory standards for recycled content in high-performance sectors.
EU recyclers and technology providers stand to benefit from new demand and investment incentives, but may face higher compliance costs for traceability and certification. Defence and aerospace manufacturers gain potential supply-chain resilience but must adapt to using secondary materials with rigorous quality assurance. EU raw-material importers could see reduced market share as domestic recycling scales up. National authorities face administrative burdens from new collection, sorting and reporting requirements under the Circular Economy Act.
The push for circularity as security involves moderate trade-offs between industrial competitiveness and regulatory costs, and between environmental goals and defence-sector performance requirements. The approach favours public intervention over pure market mechanisms, with public procurement playing a key role in creating demand certainty.