Materials and the Global Environment: Waste Mining in the 21st Century
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MATERIALS CHALLENGES FOR THE NEXT CENTURY
Materials and the Global Environment: Waste Mining in the 21st Century Robert U. Ayres, John Holmberg, and Björn Andersson What’s a mountain got that a slag pile hasn’t? —Jean Giraudoux (1882–1944) The Madwoman of Chaillot, Act 1 The environment makes up a huge, enormously complex living machine that forms a thin dynamic layer on the earth’s surface, and every human activity depends on the integrity and the proper functioning of this machine. —Barry Commoner The Closing Circle, 1971
Background Sustainability is supposed to be the watchword of the coming century. Kenneth Boulding1 characterized the economic system of the 19th century as a “cowboy economy,” meaning that resources were essentially not a limiting factor. In contrast, he noted that in the future we must prepare to live in a “spaceship economy,” adopting Barbara Ward’s famous metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.”2 In a spaceship, all materials must be recycled (or discarded into space). On the earth, the goal of total recycling or “zero emissions” is obviously a very distant one. Even the biosphere has not achieved it. Yet, for some materials, especially certain metals, this goal must be taken seriously, even in the fairly near term. The relationship between materials and the environment in the coming century can be considered from two very different perspectives. The economic perspective sees materials as consumables and—to some extent—as wastes and pollutants, but always as abstractions, lacking in differential physical attributes. Resource economics concerns itself with availability and/or scarcity and the implications for economic growth. Mainstream economics considers materials hardly at all, being concerned with capital, labor, and “technical progress,” the latter being measurable only in terms of increasing factor (especially labor) productivity, of exogenous origin. In mainstream economics, scarcity hardly exists (in free competitive markets) except as an abstract cause of price increases and a possible inducement to innovation. Environmental economics considers materials essentially only as wastes and pollutants, and concerns itself MRS BULLETIN/JUNE 2001
mainly with strategies for abatement and costs thereof. The perspective of engineering, materials science, and environmental science is very different, of course. In this perspective, transformation processes and attributes are of fundamental importance. In this article, we adopt the latter perspective, for the most part, while attempting to remain in touch with the former. The point of contact between the two perspectives is the conditions for development and adoption. Economists ask whether a technology is likely to be economically competitive in a free-market context. Engineers tend to look first for technical feasibility, then at cost. Engineering cost analyses are often criticized by economists as being too optimistic in disregarding the “hidden costs” of innovation. Economic analyses are often criticized by engineers and scientists as failing to recog
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