Canada–UK 2023-24 Critical Minerals Sustainability and Circularity Call for Proposals
Working together, the governments of Canada and the United Kingdom (UK) aim to foster and support collaborative industrial research and development (R&D) projects with a high potential for commercialization. This call for proposals is open to organizations from Canada and the UK who wish to form project consortia to perform collaborative projects focused on developing innovative products, processes, or technology-based services in the area of critical minerals technologies.
Sectors of focus
Projects must focus on innovative technologies that enable the development and commercialization of circular solutions for critical minerals and their supply chains. The project focus should be on the minerals and not on the end application performance. Projects must focus on 1 or more of the following themes:
Enhanced circularity in critical minerals
- Battery systems
- Improving recovery or efficiency of recovery of critical minerals from battery systems (e.g. cobalt, nickel, lithium, manganese from black mass)
- Improving recovery or efficiency of recovery of new critical mineral streams from battery waste (e.g. graphite, silicon, lithium iron phosphate (LFP))
- High-performance permanent magnet systems (HPPM)
- Safe and economic identification, collection, sorting, separation, dismantling of rare earth element (REE) containing end-of-life products
- Novel and sustainable routes for processing of recovered REE materials
More sustainable use of critical minerals
- Processing and manufacturing
- Novel manufacturing methods and processes across the value chain (from mine to end-product for use in battery systems or high-performance permanent magnet applications) to enhance circularity and sustainability of critical minerals
- Reduction in use
- Novel approaches to reduce reliance on existing critical minerals
- Complete substitution of critical minerals and systems
Innovations in environmental, societal and governance (ESG) for critical minerals
- Life cycle analysis (LCA) and sustainability models for LCA of critical minerals and systems
- Measurement and accounting for embedded carbon, radioactivity and other environmental and societal impacts of REE
- Provenance (e.g. material passports, digitization, traceability) of critical minerals and systems