Industrial sovereignty no longer depends solely on energy, production capacity or trade routes. It also depends on our ability to capture, transform and reintegrate the materials already present within our territories.
Opinion piece by Jean-Baptiste SANDOZ, founder of SANDOZ Green Industries.
Materials: the blind spot in the sovereignty debate
Sovereignty has returned to the centre of strategic debate. Energy, industrial, technological and food sovereignty are all being reassessed as vulnerabilities emerge and strategies evolve. Yet one issue remains underestimated: control over the material resources required by the real economy.
We continue to think about power in terms of energy, infrastructure, production capacity and trade routes. These dimensions are essential, but they are no longer sufficient. There can be no lasting industrial power without materials sovereignty.
Turning a contradiction into industrial capacity
Our economy imports raw materials while treating some of the resources already present within its territory as waste. In other words, it looks elsewhere for what it already possesses in another form.
The paradox is particularly visible in plastics, but it also applies to metals, electronic equipment and construction materials. In a world shaped by supply tensions and geopolitical fragmentation, a nation can no longer base its strategy solely on access to primary resources. It must develop the ability to capture, qualify, transform and reintegrate its secondary resources.
Materials sovereignty does not replace industrial sovereignty; it is becoming one of its foundations.
The circular economy as a strategic complement
The circular economy is still too often presented as a peripheral environmental policy. That view is outdated. Its purpose is not to eliminate the linear economy: extraction, primary processing and large-scale production chains will remain a lasting component of the global economy.
It is, however, becoming its strategic complement. An efficient industrial circular economy secures supplies, retains more value within the territory, reduces critical dependencies and rebuilds intermediate industrial capacity.
The issue is therefore no longer simply to recycle more in order to meet an obligation or improve an image. It is to decide whether we want to continue importing what we bury, destroy or allow to leave our production system, or rebuild the capacity to turn it into useful material.
Making material reintegration a competitiveness policy
A secondary resource becomes strategically valuable only when it can be used on an industrial scale. As long as it remains more expensive, less stable, riskier or harder to reintegrate than virgin material, it will remain marginal.
Materials sovereignty must therefore become a competitiveness policy. This means acting simultaneously on flow capture, sorting quality, material characterization and standardization, processing tools, industrial outlets, contractual security, price signals and purchasing criteria.
The aim is not to celebrate recycling in the abstract, but to organize the economic and industrial conditions that make material reintegration rational, robust and desirable. This is precisely the purpose of SGI’s engineering and project structuring work.
Waste as the starting point of a new value chain
For a long time, waste was viewed as the end of a cycle. We must now learn to regard it as the beginning of a new value chain. Countries that understand this shift will not simply have a more advanced environmental policy: they will build an additional industrial advantage.
Twenty-first-century industrial sovereignty will depend on access to underground resources and control over global supply routes, but also on the ability to identify, harness and reintegrate resources already present within the territory.
The twenty-first century will be defined by the energy transition, but also by mastery of materials.
Jean-Baptiste SANDOZ
Founder of SANDOZ Green Industries
Building a materials strategy
SGI supports territories, industrial companies and partners seeking to qualify their material flows, structure a value chain and prepare an industrial circular-economy project.
