To support a secure, sustainable and competitive antimony value chain in Europe, i2a calls on policymakers to:
Recognise antimony's strategic importance
Ensure that antimony's essential role in defence, energy, fire safety and key industrial value chains is fully reflected in European raw-material and industrial policy.
Consider antimony for inclusion in the EU Strategic Raw Materials list at its next review.
Strengthen and diversify antimony supply chains
Support the diversification of primary and secondary sources of antimony and encourage investment in European processing, recovery and recycling capacity.
Unlock the potential of antimony recycling
Remove unnecessary barriers to the collection, movement, recovery and recycling of antimony-containing materials, and recognise secondary antimony as an important contributor to Europe's raw-material security and circular economy.
Regulate substances based on science and risk
Ensure that chemicals legislation remains science-based, proportionate and risk-based, taking account of hazard, exposure, use and the socio-economic benefits provided by materials and their applications.
Ensure coherence across EU legislation
Ensure greater coherence between chemicals, product, waste, occupational safety and raw-material policies, avoiding conflicting requirements and unintended barriers to safe use, recycling and circularity.
Enable informed decisions on substitution and essential uses
Ensure that regulatory decisions on substitution take into account the availability, technical performance, safety, lifecycle impacts and overall sustainability of alternatives, particularly where antimony contributes to safety, durability or strategically important technologies.
“Enable informed decisions on substitution and essential uses” puts the emphasis on good policymaking instead. It also allows i2a to make the perfectly reasonable point that replacing one substance with another does not automatically produce a safer or more sustainable outcome.