In May 2024, the European Union adopted the Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA), a landmark regulation designed to secure Europe’s access to the materials that power the green and digital transitions. The CRMA sets ambitious targets for 2030:
At the heart of this strategy are the Strategic Projects — pioneering initiatives that benefit from fast-tracked permitting, access to national and European funding, and regulatory recognition at EU level.
RECOVER-IT is proudly 1 of the 47 projects selected in March 2025 by the European Commission, including only 4 from Italy. RECOVER-IT is the only Strategic Project focused on recovery from wastewater, positioning it at the forefront of Europe’s efforts to strengthen resilience, autonomy, and sustainability in the critical raw materials value chain.
The initiative proposes a paradigm shift: recovering critical metals directly from industrial wastewater, turning hazardous waste into a valuable resource. Europe generates an estimated 4.5 million Tonnes of industrial wastewater containing dissolved metals every year, a secondary reserve that has so far been largely untapped (95% of these metals are not recovered), and which RECOVER-IT aims to transform into a strategic source of supply.
At the core of the project is a proprietary Supercritical Water Precipitation (SWaP) technology, which makes it possible to extract with over 99% efficiency metals such as nickel, copper and platinum group elements, today largely trapped in sludge and confined to landfills or, worse, dispersed into the environment through surface waters.
The model, based on modular and scalable hubs, can be adapted to more than 60 industrial processes and aims to establish, by 2030, a European network capable of recovering over 20,000 Tonnes of critical metals per year. In doing so, RECOVER-IT not only reduces environmental risks, but also contributes directly to European industrial autonomy and the CRMA’s targets, supporting the transition to a more circular, resilient and sustainable economy.
