A transitional perspective of global and regional mineral material flows

Abstract

This article presents the first broad estimate of mineral use and efficiency taking into account two unique sets of mineral material groups (critical and precious) mostly used in the 21st century. It is therefore distinct from the previous studies which were focused on biomass and construction minerals. Standardized methodology for material flow accounting was applied based on long time series data from 1955 to 2015. Mineral flows, resource productivity, resource intensity, resource extraction, consumption and trade patterns were presented and compared, with differences and similarities verified. Our results showed that mineral use increased from 3 gigatons to 40 gigatons for metallic minerals, 3 gigatons to about 10 gigatons for fuel minerals, 20 million tons to about 100 million tons for critical minerals, and 200 tons to about 11,000 tons for precious minerals from 1955 to 2015. Regional metabolic rates ranged from 0.45 t/cap/a in Africa to 7 t/cap/a in Asia. Meanwhile, Europe and Western Offshoots presented decreasing trends, Asia highlighted surging mineral consumption while LACA presented increasing mineral domestic extraction. Western Offshoots, Latin America and the Caribbean and Africa were net exporters of metallic minerals while Asia emerged as a net importer in the last three decades. Different regions demonstrated different trends in material intensity and resource productivity. The impact of Gross Domestic Product (GDP), on Domestic Material Consumption (DMC), for different mineral groups in the different regions was investigated and discussed. Our results furnish critical intuition to future effective and efficient global and regional resource management.