A CRMA list-based category for raw materials considered critical because of economic importance and supply-risk criteria.
Critical raw material is a CRMA policy category, not a generic statement that a material is important. The list in Annex II reflects EU assessment of economic importance and supply risk. It includes battery-relevant materials such as cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese, and battery-grade nickel, but it is wider than batteries and should not be collapsed into the strategic raw material list.
This page is anchored in CRMA Article 4(1) and Annex II, Section 1. Article 4(2) connects the critical list to economic-importance and supply-risk thresholds and states that the updated critical raw materials list includes strategic raw materials. Critical raw material is therefore related to, but not identical to strategic raw material.
Regulation (EU) 2024/1252 establishing a framework for ensuring a secure and sustainable supply of critical raw materials
The raw materials, including in unprocessed form, at any stage of processing and when occurring as a by-product of other extraction, processing or recycling processes, listed in Annex II, Section 1, shall be considered to be critical raw materials. Annex II, Section 1 lists: antimony; arsenic; bauxite/alumina/aluminium; baryte; beryllium; bismuth; boron; cobalt; coking coal; copper; feldspar; fluorspar; gallium; germanium; hafnium; helium; heavy rare earth elements; light rare earth elements; lithium; magnesium; manganese; graphite; nickel — battery grade; niobium; phosphate rock; phosphorus; platinum group metals; scandium; silicon metal; strontium; tantalum; titanium metal; tungsten; vanadium.
List-based CRMA source layer; Article 4(1) points to Annex II, Section 1, and Article 4(2) states that an updated list of critical raw materials shall include the strategic raw materials listed in Annex I, Section 1 as well as any other raw material meeting the economic-importance and supply-risk thresholds.
Reference: Article 4(1) / Annex II, Section 1
This term matters when companies need to identify whether a material in a product, component, battery, supplier record, or sourcing file falls inside the CRMA critical-material perimeter. That classification can affect risk monitoring, customer evidence requests, sourcing strategy, and internal material data models.
The useful distinction is between material identity and policy status. Minespider treats critical raw material as the EU risk-relevance category that sits on top of a material record, so the system can connect the material name to supply-risk, strategic-material, battery, recycling, and due-diligence evidence without treating those concepts as the same thing.