High-entropy materials are being developed in laboratories. megaflopp/Shutterstock

José Manuel Torralba, IMDEA MATERIALS

Europe is increasingly in a fragile position when it comes to sustaining our future prosperity. We’ve taken on numerous goals to save the planet, but lack the business leadership, innovation, and R&D to remain competitive. Worse still, we don’t have the raw materials needed to make the transition. Europe is facing the greatest shortage of essential raw materials in its history.

The latest list of critical minerals and metals, as defined by the new EU regulation (2024), includes, among others: bauxite/alumina/aluminium, bismuth, boron, cobalt, copper, gallium, germanium, lithium, magnesium, manganese, graphite, nickel, platinum group metals, rare earths for permanent magnets, silicon metal, titanium and tungsten.

It is well known that the largest reserves of these materials are found in China, Russia, and Africa (with mining largely controlled by China), and in some cases, the U.S. and South America.

Europe does have some interesting reserves of metals such as lithium (Li), for example, but European society is particularly intolerant of mining practices that would allow them to be exploited.

So we face a severe shortage of resources that are crucial both now and for the future.

Alternative energy requires critical metals

All alternative energy technologies to fossil fuels, geothermal, hydrothermal, nuclear, bioenergy, hydrogen-based energy, solar, wind, batteries, etc., require enormous quantities of metals, especially steel, copper, aluminium, and nickel.

Batteries for electric vehicles require large amounts of silicon, cobalt, graphite, manganese, and rare earths.

The great shortage

Graphite tops the list of critical materials. We will need 610 million tonnes to meet electric vehicle demand by 2030, but global reserves are only 300 million tonnes.

We’ll need 420 million tonnes of nickel, but only have 90. For cobalt and lithium, we’ll need 90 and 75 million tonnes, respectively, and we currently have only 10 and 20.

In short, regardless of their origin, we simply don’t have enough metals to produce the batteries required for vehicle electrification in the coming years.

Copper, another key material, presents its own looming crisis. We will need 480 million tonnes, and global reserves currently stand at 830. At the current consumption rate, 700 million tonnes will be used in the next 20 years, as much as has been used in the whole of human history. We are rapidly heading toward a major copper shortage.

Nearly all high-performance alloys (ultra-high-strength steels, superalloys, biomedical alloys, lightweight or shape-memory alloys, etc.) require these critical elements, and we either don’t have them, or they are difficult to obtain.

A revolutionary scientific proposal underway

This is where a revolutionary scientific approach comes into play, one that resembles “zero-waste cooking.” If we don’t have the ideal ingredients for our recipe, we search for them in the leftovers.

This has always been the strategy during times of scarcity, and we are now living through such a time. We have vast quantities of “leftovers” available in scrap and electronic waste.

Many of these critical metals are under-recycled from scrap (less than 50%), and the situation is even worse for e-waste, where only 17% is reused.

This is because the traditional way of designing and producing alloys is similar to how a gourmet chef prepares a dish: selecting precise ingredients and combining them in a meticulous, sequential order. Anything not on the recipe list is discarded, for fear it will spoil the flavour.

If this chef were to use leftovers, using the same orthodox criteria, it would be difficult to extract the necessary ingredients.

But what if we gave the chef tools to mix leftovers in a way that still produced a delicious final dish?

That’s exactly what we can do with alloy design using the high-entropy concept.

The magic of high entropy

When high-entropy alloys were introduced in the 21st century, it was shown that by mixing “many elements” — often in ways that break traditional metallurgical rules — and thanks to the high entropy of the mixture, we can obtain microstructures that give materials exceptional properties.

This new approach changes the traditional paradigm by using many alloying elements to create high-entropy configurations. It eliminates the need for “pre-restricted elements” and reduces the direct use of critical metals traditionally required to achieve specific properties.

Blends from scrap

By leveraging high entropy, it becomes possible to create blends from scrap or metal concentrates in e-waste that meet the criteria needed for high-performance microstructures.

This removes the need to use forbidden elements (like copper in most steels), avoids using critical metals as raw materials, and enables the direct use of commercial alloy scrap or multi-component mixtures from mining waste and e-waste.

The perfect material

But is it really possible to make a gourmet dish from scraps?

The exciting thing is that we can combine them in infinite ways, with endless percentage combinations, to arrive at the final “perfect” material — just as the chef would like it.

If we have five (or ten) scrap families or recycled alloy combinations from e-waste, the mixing possibilities are endless.

And fortunately, today we have the perfect “kitchen robot” to analyse the scraps and calculate the right proportions: artificial intelligence.

We already know how to train a digital platform — using data from various sources — to decide the ideal combination of scrap so that the resulting material can compete with the best high-performance alloys.

We can cook that perfect dish from seemingly impossible mixes. Will it change the world? We’re working on it.

José Manuel Torralba, Professor at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, IMDEA Materials

This article was originally published in The Conversation. Read the original here.