Metal spectra as indicators of development

Abstract

We have assembled extensive information on the cycles of seven industrial metals in 49 countries, territories, or groups of countries, drawn from a database of some 200,000 material flows, and have devised analytical approaches to treat the suite of metals as composing an approach to a national "materials metabolism." We demonstrate that in some of the more developed countries, per capita metal use is more than 10 times the global average. Additionally, countries that use more than the per capita world average of any metal do so for all metals, and vice versa, and countries that are above global average rates of use are very likely to be above global average rates at all stages of metal life cycles from fabrication onward. We show that all countries are strongly dependent on international trade to supply the spectrum of nonrenewable resources that modern technology requires, regardless of their level of development. We also find that the rate of use of the spectrum of metals stock is highly correlated to per capita gross domestic product, as well as to the Human Development Index and the Global Competitiveness Innovation Index. The implication is that as wealth and technology increase in developing countries, strong demand will be created not for a few key resources, but across the entire spectrum of the industrial metals. Long-term metal demand can be estimated given gross domestic product projections; the results suggest overall metal flow into use in 2050 of 5-10 times today's level should supplies permit.industrial ecology | material flow analysis | metal cycles I t is without any doubt that modern society is only possible because of the use of metals. Metals possess properties of high utility (high melting points, structural stiffness, electrical conductivity, etc.) difficult or impossible to duplicate by other materials. As a consequence, the use of metals exploded in the twentieth century, especially after 1950. The result is a panoply of products that now appear essential to modern lives-furnaces, medical diagnostic machines, computers, cellular telephones, and on and on.Metals are seldom deposited one at a time in nature (1, 2), nor do they tend to be employed one by one (3). Rather, they see use as components of alloys or in composite structures, or as components of complex assembled products (4, 5). Analytical studies of metal cycles generally address only individual metals, however (e.g., refs. 6-8), largely because detailed information on combinations of metals is seldom available.In the material flow analysis approach, a metal cycle is often expressed through four principal processes: production, fabrication and manufacturing, use, and waste management and recycling. The cycle can be illustrated as shown in Fig. 1. It is characterized by processes that are linked through markets (9), each market indicating trade with other regions at the respective life stages. The scrap market plays a central role in that it connects manufacturing and the waste management and recycling stage with production and fa...

Will metal scarcity impede routine industrial use?

“…The same result was found by Graedel and Cao 33 for a group of seven widely used metals: chromium, copper, lead, iron, nickel, silver, and zinc. Similar studies have not been carried out for other metals, but the incorporation of so many of the elements in a wide variety of consumer products that also contain the metals that have been studied suggests that the same pattern would hold for many others.…”

Urban Mines of Copper: Size and Potential for Recycling in the EU

“…MFA was applied to investigate the anthropogenic cycle of several materials such as construction minerals [18,19] and plastics [20][21][22]. Metals, however, captured most of the research interest due to their importance in modern technology and strong correlation with the human development [23]. In recent years, several studies have analyzed the anthropogenic Cu cycle at different geographical levels, providing a measure of several performance indicators (e.g., end-of-life recycling rate, EOL-RR).…”

Industrial Ecology: The role of manufactured capital in sustainability

“…Among the few exceptions in those early papers were Ayres' material flow analysis of toxic heavy metals (17) and Duchin's proposal to use economic input-output analysis (18) to describe and analyze the metabolic connectedness among physical factors of production, industrial production, and consumptions sectors. Those two approaches have developed into core methods of Industrial Ecology today (6,(19)(20)(21)(22)(23)(24)(25). The research articles included in the present Special Feature provide ample evidence for Industrial Ecology's success in applying and further developing these methods and in quantifying the industrial metabolism for different industrial processes and across different scales in many of its ramifications.…”