Abstract
Although metals and minerals represent a prominent asset for sustainable development, continuous population growth and the current accelerations in energy and mobility transitions are increasing concerns regarding their accessibility for current and future generations. As recent insights have identified access rather than depletion to be the dominant factor for resources, this paper elaborates on the (in)accessibility concept of such raw materials once they have entered the technosphere. It identifies six human actions that compromise accessibility: emitting, landfilling, tailing, downcycling, hoarding and abandoning. It analyses the degree of the generated inaccessibility and proposes estimated duration of inaccessibility as a proxy. It further explores how current sustainability management tools like material flow analysis and life cycle analysis could be further developed to address resource (in)accessibility. Finally, the paper presents a case study on cobalt in the EU, where five compromising actions make 70% of the extracted cobalt inaccessible due to tailings (21.3%), landfilling (31.2%), downcycling (11.6%), dissipation (1.4%) and hoarding (4.3%); only 30% is used to expand the functional stock.
Highlights
Natural resources, including minerals and metals, are key to satis fying mankind’s needs and in the future. Mancini et al (2018) investigated the function of raw materials in meeting the UN’s Sus tainable Development Goals for 2030
When we look at what compromising actions are addressed by public bodies that deal with resource management, we observe that UNEP points to tailings and environmental dissipation at use in the visualiza tion of metal cycles (UNEP, 2011)
When the results are compared to the simplified Sankey diagram of the corresponding Materials System Analysis (MSA) study, first the reader should be aware that the system under study is different, in the sense that Fig. 5 represents all flows, within and outside the EU, that are associated with operations that lead to net addition of the in use stock within the EU
Summary
Natural resources, including minerals and metals, are key to satis fying mankind’s needs and in the future. Mancini et al (2018) investigated the function of raw materials in meeting the UN’s Sus tainable Development Goals for 2030. They argue that there is no justification to leave e.g. cobalt underground (to avoid depletion), if cobalt can remain in use within the technosphere for decades, delivering benefits to current and future generations This idea has been coined in the LCA community by Frischknecht (2014) where he brought in terms like resource borrowing and post-consumer resource availability; but the latter concepts have not further been developed according to the knowledge of the authors. The burdens associated with the primary supply of raw materials and metals should be minimized by cleaner technologies for both expanding and maintaining the functional stock This means that, ideally, minerals and metals extracted by the primary production sector are fully transferred as a net addition to the functional stock (NAFS) and there is no need to compensate for resources already mined, but made inaccessible by the abovementioned compromising actions. Key terminology is explained in Appendix 1
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