EVEN CLOSER landed in Brussels for the EIT RawMaterials Summit 2026, and the room was listening.
The Investor Day brought together founders, investors and policymakers across the full raw materials value chain, and the response to our vision and to the European Circular Economy Challenge was strong: real conversations with startups looking at the upcoming cohort, and concrete interest from investors on the wider semiconductor circularity opportunity.
Just as valuable were the conversations on the sidelines. We sat down with the teams behind SICAPERMA | EU Project, BATMASS EU Project, CLOSER to map out cross-project collaborations: the kind of work that turns parallel #I3 initiatives into a coherent European answer to the critical raw materials challenge.
EVEN CLOSER is more than a project. It is a shared commitment, backed by European Innovation Council and SMEs Executive Agency (EISMEA) through the #I3Instrument, to make sure that Europe’s semiconductor circularity is not built only where infrastructure already exists. The recovery, reprocessing and remanufacturing of secondary materials from e-waste belongs to every region willing to take part, and that is the value chain we are building together.
We are leaving Brussels with more questions worth answering, and more partners to answer them with.