Quarried natural resources
Quarried natural resources comprise a great number of mineral deposits, in particular gravel and sands, broken natural stone, lime, marl and dolomite stones and gypsum and anhydrite stones, as well as clays and loams. Quarried natural resources are bulk raw materials. Due to geological conditions, they are site-bound and not distributed evenly across the country. The materials are hused mainly for the construction
Every year, the building materials and quarrying industry extracts roughly 550 million tons of primary raw materials or uses these materials in production. The building materials and quarrying industry (earth and stone) in Germany comprises some 1,600 companies operating approximately 3,100 extraction facilities. LafargeHolcim-Gruppe is the largest single company in this sector (2016 EITI Report, figure 8).
The local nature of the market for quarried natural resources means that publication on revenues from the sector is sensitive for companies, as it can reveal information on price.
Salts
The EITI in Germany also counts salts as extractive resource. place in Germany in six potash mines (in Hesse, Lower Saxony, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia), seven salt mines (in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Lower Saxony, North Rhine-Westphalia, Saxony-Anhalt and Thuringia) and seven salt works (in Baden-Wuerttemberg, Bavaria, Mecklenburg-Western-Pomerania, Lower Saxony and North Rhine-Westphalia). The salt is used for commercial and industrial salt, for the food and chemical industries.
Social and economic contribution
The Germany extractive industry contribution to the economy and employment is below 1%. However, in some regions the extraction is or has been the main employer, and the government put in place schemes to ease the transition to regions no longer extracting, such as for hard coal.