Their practical, material initiatives momentarily widened the range of ideas, debates and possibilities – some of which persist.
In addition, the department benefits from the university-wide Center for Nonlinear and Complex Systems, the Quantitative Initiative, the Duke Institute for Brain Sciences, the recently initiated Duke Center for Soft Matter and the Materials Initiative, all joint efforts between departments in Trinity, Pratt and Medicine.
Current research is coherent with the aims of the Raw Materials Initiative in that it addresses primary production, recycling, and substitution as means to secure the supply of critical metals.
Market forces may have more of an effect on China's ability to control the market in the coming years than export restrictions, said Dudley Kingsnorth, a former rare earths mining executive who is now a business professor and the director of the Critical Materials Initiative at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.
The Raw Materials Initiative of the European Union (EU), which aims to "boost overall resource efficiency and promote recycling to reduce the EU's consumption of primary raw materials and decrease the relative import dependence", is currently implemented on the national and industry levels.
In this article, we review such ongoing developments with a focus on publicly funded research projects on critical metals in Europe, and discuss their contribution to reaching the objectives of the Raw Materials Initiative as well as the more general goals of sustainability.
New initiatives with Physics participation are the Materials Initiative and the Duke Center for Soft Matter.
The most prominent related policy strategy focusing on aspects of import dependency, resource supply and access to natural resources is the Raw Materials Initiative (European Commission 2008, 2011d).
The resource nexus is distinct from the prevailing discussion of critical materials done by the European Union's (EU) Raw Materials Initiative or the U.S. Department of Energy (DoE), both of whom identify priority materials of concern following more narrow criteria of availability and access.
More recently formed are the new Duke Robotics Group that draws together faculty from engineering, computer science and surgery, and a nascent Materials Initiative aimed at developing new and improved materials to create better therapeutics, improve energy storage, speed computation and detect environmental hazards.
