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Environmental aspects are more and more relevant for raw material policy-making and responsible sourcing strategies. This trend is partly based on growing public awareness of problems and impacts associated with extraction and processing of ores and minerals. Disaster events such as the tailing dam failures in Kolontár (Hungary, October 2010) and Bento Rodriguez (Brazil, November 2015) quite frequently highlight the fact that many mining and processing practices are associated with substantial environmental impacts and risks for the local and even regional environments. However, there is also increasing recognition that the rather devastating environmental performance of many past and current mining projects is a major reason for communities around the world to oppose both the development of new and the expansion of existing mines. Although mining companies constantly have to increase their efforts to secure the social license to operate, many scholars already point out that both environmental impacts and associated social and political reactions are emerging as a decisive factor determining current and future raw material supply. In light of these concerns, raw material policy-making requires solid information on environmental hot spots in mining, as well as on raw materials of particular concern. Whereas indicators and information systems are already well developed for geological, technical, structural, political, regulatory, and economic supply risks, there is currently no holistic method and information system for environmental concerns associated with the mining of raw materials. Although life cycle assessment can provide methodological support for various environmental aspects, it has substantial weaknesses in the fields of ecosystem degradation, impacts on fresh-and groundwater resources, and hazard potentials from episodic disaster events. This paper presents a methodology that aims to fill this gap. Our proposed method provides a system of 11 indicators allowing the identification of raw material-specific environmental hot spots and rankings of raw materials. Although the indicator system is qualitative in nature, its composition and aggregation cover the most relevant environmental concerns arising from mining and allow prioritizing of raw materials from a global environmental perspective.

Abstract:Dematerialization is a paradigm in resource conservation strategies. Material use should be reduced so that resource consumption as a whole can be lowered. The benefit for humankind should be completely decoupled from the natural expenditure by a definite factor X. Instinctively, this approach is convincing, because our entire value-added chain is based on material transformation. Targets for mass-based indicators are found within the context of justification for ecological carrying capacity and intergenerational fairness, taking into account the economic and socio-political expectation of raw material scarcity. However, in light of further development of material flow indicators and the related dematerialization targets, the question arises as to what they actually stand for and what significance they have for resource conservation. Can it be assumed that pressure on the environment will decline steadily if the use of materials is reduced, whether for an economy or at the level of individual products or processes? The present narrative review paper has discussed this issue and takes into account the authors' experience of the extended political and scientific discourse on dematerialization in Germany and Europe. As a result, a high "resource relevance" cannot be inferred from high physical material inputs at any of the levels considered. It has been shown that establishing mass-based indicators as control and target variables is questionable and that dematerialization exclusively based on such indicators without mapping other resources should be critically examined.

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