Strategic Autonomy for Sale: How Trafigura Took Europe’s Zinc Shield
- Editor
- Nov 14
- 3 min read
When De Tijd highlighted zinc’s vital role in the green transition, it might have sounded like a niche industrial story. Zinc may not appear on the European Commission’s list of “critical” materials, but its byproducts — germanium, indium, and gallium — are indispensable for semiconductors, fiber optics, batteries, and advanced defense systems. These rare metals place zinc smelters like Nyrstar at the heart of a geopolitical contest. As demand for critical minerals surges, Europe’s production capacity is fading — and once-strategic assets are quietly slipping into foreign hands.
A Geopolitical Own Goal
While Brussels works diligently on legislation to bolster Europe’s “strategic autonomy,” much of that autonomy has already been surrendered in practice. China now controls between 50 and 85 percent of global processing of critical raw materials, while Europe continues to dismantle what remains of its own capacity. The sell-off of zinc smelter Nyrstar — once a crown jewel of European metallurgy — exposes how Europe’s industrial decline has become a geopolitical liability.
With Nyrstar’s sell-off, Europe lost control of facilities that produce more than a million tonnes of zinc a year while also refining five critical metals: antimony, bismuth, tellurium, germanium and indium. These are precisely the materials the Critical Raw Materials Act deems indispensable for defense, digital infrastructure and green technology.
Europe’s Raw Materials Paradox
The Critical Raw Materials Act sets an ambitious goal: by 2030, at least 40 percent of the EU’s critical-material processing should take place within its borders. Yet that vision collides with reality. Europe has already let go of its most important zinc smelter. By allowing Nyrstar’s assets to be taken over by Singapore-based commodity trader Trafigura, the EU has handed its strategic buffer to a powerful foreign player.
As commodities journalist Javier Blas notes, trading houses like Trafigura act as “shadow diplomats,” shaping geopolitics to their own advantage. They operate in a grey zone between trade, power and politics — while Europe still treats its industrial backbone as just another market good.
The European Catch-22
Europe’s chronic lack of industrial resolve is visible not only in Nyrstar’s story but also in the state of its raw materials policy today. According to Eurometaux, the continent will need around forty new mines and processing plants by 2030 to sustain its green and digital transition. Yet many of these projects are stuck in limbo: soaring energy costs, sluggish permitting, and competition from subsidized industries in the United States and Asia threaten to stall production before it even starts.
The paradox is hard to miss — Europe wants to cut its dependence on China, yet keeps allowing its own industrial base to wither. Policy drift, expensive energy, and the growing grip of foreign commodity traders with murky agendas are steadily undermining Europe’s economic weight and strategic autonomy.
The Autonomy Illusion
Europe cannot credibly call for independence from third countries in critical raw materials while letting its zinc industry — the source of germanium, indium, and other essential metals — slip into foreign hands. Without its own smelters, the continent’s green transition will remain hostage to external players with their own strategic interests.
Nyrstar has become a symbol of Europe’s industrial naïveté — a reminder that rhetoric about “strategic autonomy” rings hollow without control over the assets that make it possible. If Brussels is serious about reducing dependence, it must first face how it allowed its own zinc to melt away.
