Recovery of Materials and Fresh Water Supply using Renewable Energy

World population is constantly growing and at the same time the lifestyle is increasing progressively. The growth process requires intense exploitation of known resources as well as more and more new resources to be made available. Such growing demand creates pressure on the huge but finite available global resources. Water, food and energy demand is growing proportionally and are interrelated in a complex way, the so-called water-energy-food nexus [1]. Similarly the demand for materials, inevitably related to water, energy and food supply is steadily increasing as well and they are implicitly part of the nexus. Adequate supply is required in order to secure our present and to sustain the growth satisfying the increasing needs. The pressure on resources is often directly translated on pressure on the land use. Land is massively utilized for food production, fresh water supply, fuels supply, energy production as well as extraction of materials. Already at this stage there are discussions on possible competition between the various activities with regard to land use; the case of bio-masses just to mention the most evident case [2-4]. New technologies will make our life even easier and more comfortable but inevitably they will put more pressure on different resources. For example the large deployment of batteries has already an impact on the supply of lithium worldwide and the utilization of magnesium ion batteries in the near future may pose the same issue [4]. Another example is the supply of rare earth elements critical for the development of renewable energy and other smart technologies [6-8]. From the EU perspective, restricting to energy, both the supply of fuels and raw materials are mainly depending on imports from outside the EU. This is weakening somehow the future security of supply and it is posing question for the long-term strategy to follow [9].