What the consortium set out to do over four years, and the impact it projects if the technologies reach industrial scale.
Taken directly from the WISER factsheet.
01
Establish routes to antimony, silicon and silver from photovoltaic waste, asbestos mining residues and geothermal water residues.
02
Take recovered fractions to the purity semiconductor manufacturing actually requires, by low-carbon routes.
03
Convert purified feedstock into crystals and wafers evaluated against power semiconductor requirements.
04
Give recovered material an origin that can be verified independently, using signatures inherent to the material itself.
05
Assess and lower the environmental and social footprint of the whole chain while reducing Europe’s import exposure.
Recovering critical raw materials from three waste streams
Strengthening European supply security
Demonstrating eight technologies at TRL 6–7
Enabling circular semiconductor value chains
Targets stated in the WISER factsheet, over the project’s four years and beyond into industrial deployment.
up to
75 %
of Europe’s future demand covered
up to
50 %
lower production costs
€4 bn
annual production cost savings
15 Mt
of CO2 emissions avoided
350
new jobs created
8
technologies demonstrated at TRL 6–7
Recovered material only changes anything if the policy and market conditions let it compete. PowerShift works on the other half of the problem: stakeholder and policy analysis, mapping the political processes and access points that matter, and organising events that put the people who decide in the same room as the people who build.
CSEM leads environmental and social life cycle assessment across the chain, so the environmental case is measured rather than assumed.