## 2 Materials and Methods  
The research framework includes four steps of the analysis, based on a concept presented in Figure 1. In individual steps, various methods and materials were used, which are summarized below:  
Steps 1 and 2: State of the art analysis with the use of a desk research method was conducted. This included the comprehensive analysis of the European documents related to mineral resources management, which have been published online on a multilingual and free database gathering the EU legal acts, enabling direct access to EU law: EUR-Lex (eur-lex.europa.eu). These steps also included an overview of the European and national documents presenting CE and the Green Deal approaches. The strategic documents that are directly related to the implementation of CE and sustainability assumptions in mineral resource management on the European level have been selected for analysis. The state-of-the-art analysis also included a revision of the available reviewed papers published on scientific platforms such as Elsevier Science Direct, Elsevier Scopus, Google Scholar and MDPI database. The selection of the literature has been made based on a few keywords, as \"sustainable development\", \"SD\", \"circular economy\", \"CE\", \"indicators\", \"raw materials\", \"resources\", \"management\". It should be emphasized that the initial analysis indicated several hundred literature positions, due to the fact that the concept of sustainable development has been described in many publications around the world, and since 2015 there is a clear increase in the number of CE-related items. Therefore, the research in the latest publications that is directly related to the adopted research topic (sustainable and circular RMs management) has been selected. Step 3: An analysis of selected indicators referring to circular and sustainable RM management has been conducted with the use of statistical data published by the European Statistical Office - Eurostat (ec.europa.eu/Eurostat). The selection of indicators consistent with assumed areas of resource management has been done based on the review of already existing indicators which have been indicated in the CE monitoring framework [6]. The EC also states that the CE Package is instrumental in reaching sustainable development goals (SDG), therefore the Directorate General for Environment which is the EC department responsible for EU policy on the environment [10] published a list of indicators related to the sustainable management of RMs, which can also support the CE implementation. They have been also chosen and analyzed in the current research. The final list of analyzed indicators included five CE indicators provided in the CE monitoring framework and three indicators focused on the sustainable resource management. The characteristics of these indicators are provided in Table 1.  
Step 4: This step included an interpretation of results presenting selected indicators on circular and sustainable RMs management and the EC directions. The method of synthesis (combining distinguished aspects), induction (deriving conclusions from the premises that are their individual cases) and round table discussion (consultation in the group of internal and external experts) were used in this part of the research. Figure 1: Scheme of the research framework. \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c} \hline
**CE Indicator** & **Definition** & **Relevance** \\ \hline \hline \multicolumn{3}{c}{**Production and Consumption**} \\ \hline EU self-sufficiency in raw materials & This measures how much the EU is independent from the rest of the world for several KEMs & RMs are essential for the functioning of the EU’s economy. A wide variety of industrial sectors depend on the secure supply of RMs, typically in a diversified mts of domestic extraction, recycling and imports.