Scenarios for Resource Use

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From the course by Universiteit Leiden

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

15 ratings

Universiteit Leiden

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

15 ratings

Metals are present everywhere around us and are one of the major materials upon which our economies are built. Economic development is deeply coupled with the use of metals. During the 20th century, the variety of metal applications in society grew rapidly. In addition to mass applications such as steel in buildings and aluminium in planes, more and more different metals are in use for innovative technologies such as the use of the speciality metal indium in LCD screens. A lot of metals will be needed in the future. It will not be easy to provide them. In particular in emerging economies, but also in industrialised countries, the demand for metals is increasing rapidly. Mining and production activities expand, and with that also the environmental consequences of metal production. In this course, we will explore those consequences and we will also explore options to move towards a more sustainable system of metals production and use. We will focus especially on the options to reach a circular economy for metals: keeping metals in use for a very long time, to avoid having to mine new ones. This course is based on the reports of the Global Metals Flows Group of the International Resource Panel that is part of UN Environment. An important aspect that will come back each week, are the UN Sustainable Development Goals, the SDGs. Those are ambitious goals to measure our progress towards a more sustainable world. We will use the SDGs as a touching stone for the assessment of the metals challenge, as well as the solutions we present in this course to solve that challenge.

From the lesson

Look into the Future

In this final week of the course, we will look briefly into the future. What can we expect for the next decades or even the next century? We’ll introduce the concept of scenarios, storylines about the future that have no predictive value but have their value as imagination of what could happen, and what the consequences would be if it did. And we will apply that to our major metals. Will demand go on rising? What will happen with the environmental impacts? Does it help, from the point of view of metal production, to have a renewable energy system in the background? Will more circularity in our economy make a difference? In short, is it possible to reconcile the SDG development goals with the environmental ones?

Scenarios for Resource Use9:42

Scenarios of Metal Demand and Supply and Related Environmental Impacts11:40

The Metals Challenge and the Sustainable Development Goals5:26

Meet the Instructors

Ester van der Voet
Dr.
Institute of Environmental Sciences

As I said before,

it's important to make a difference between

the dynamics of demand and the dynamics of supply.

So in the first place,

what are the important drivers for metals demand?

Well, there's the population.

That's a very big driver and it's the most important driver actually for basic goods.

So, construction, houses, electricity,

also household appliances every household needs them.

So there's a direct relation with the number of people.

Welfare GDP is the most important driver for luxury goods like cars or electronics.

It also drives the basic goods.

For example, if you get richer,

you want a bigger house,

but there is a certain saturation level,

you still want only one house.

In the clip, climbing the materials letter,

this is explained a little bit.

You can see how when welfare rises,

the demand for metals also rises.

But at a certain moment it sort of levels off

and it does not rise anymore even if people get richer.

Another driver for resource use that's also tightly linked to welfare,

to GDP, is energy use.

Of course, it takes energy to produce metals,

but metals are also used to produce energy.

So, in that way, energy use and therefore welfare is a very important driver as well.

Sometimes with growing welfare goods may shift from luxury goods to basic food,

and you can see that in this graph.

Here you see the demand for a number of products containing metals

and some of them have been levelling off like washing machines and refrigerators.

If welfare rises, well,

households want to own a washing machine or a refrigerator,

but they do not want more than one.

So, here we have a stock that saturates and when people get richer,

they do not buy more refrigerators or washing machines.

Others are still growing.

Those are dishwashers, well,

that's something that came later.

So, therefore, the saturation level has not been reached yet,

but it's moving already from a luxury good to a basic good.

And the last example in this graph is the television.

Here, you see that it doesn't stop at

one and that's because you do want more than one television,

apparently, when you get rich.

Not just one, but three or- well,

I think that the average is now on three in the richer countries,

but in some households, they want even more than three television sets.

So that's something that's still growing although in essence televisions are

no longer a luxury good because each household even the very poorest one has one.

Another important driver related to economics is prices.

Prices are very relevant for consumer products.

When they go down, people buy more of it.

But for individual materials,

this is often not the case.

And you can see that in the metals prices.

As René Kleijn showed in earlier weeks,

the metals prices have been fluctuating,

but overall have been fairly constant if you

look at the long-term during the 20th century.

So, scarcity which has occurred in several instances has not

translated in higher metal prices on the long term and this is important to realize.

Of course, prices are important. They always are.

But on the long term they may not be so important,

especially when looking to metals.

Technology is also a very important driver for demand.

We have these new technologies for communication,

for renewable energy etc.

They rely heavily on metals.

Of course, again, it's not so much the demand for metals that is relevant,

but the demand for the products where these metals are contained in.

But it is in all very important.

And it's also quite difficult to forecast because metals as materials sometimes,

or even often, can be replaced.

And certainly in the long run,

they can be by other metals or by even non-metal materials depending on the application.

You can also see that in forecasts of specialty metals demand,

technology is very dominant because

the specialty metals demand goes into details on, well,

what will be the future demand of

certain specific technologies like communication or medical technologies,

and therefore certain metals are needed.

But in scenarios for the future,

it's not really possible to make a decent forecast.

So it can only be explored in a what if manner.

What if these technologies are produced and use certain metals?

What if these technologies or these products are scaled up to the global level?

What would happen then to the demand for certain metals?

This is an example of how technology drives the demand for metals.

We've seen this figure before in various lectures.

One to explain the metals challenge,

and one to see the impacts of a transition to renewable energy on the metal's demand.

You can see in this graph that the demand for metals rises if we

assume that we will shift in the direction of a more renewable energy system.

And this is really also a scenario.

It's an assumption that we make on the future.

What would happen if we would shift towards

a renewable energy system based on these specific technologies?

Well, then the demand for metals would indeed rise.

Whether or not it actually happens,

that remains to be seen.

But you can explore what would be the consequences if it did happen.

Now, what are the most important drivers for metal supply?

Of course, the really most important driver is demand.

We only produce metals that we actually want to use.

But besides that, the most important drivers are technology and time.

Time, for example, the exploitation of new mine takes time.

The estimate is that from the first point of discovering the ore until the point

of having the mine ready for operation takes about 25 years.

So, even if you do find new metals,

it takes time to actually be able to get them out.

Improving technology for mining and refining that can

gain access to previously unexploitable deposits,

so that also changes supply.

And it can also do it in a more efficient way,

for example, using less energy or using less chemicals et cetera.

So, the environmental challenge can be alleviated.

Technology for urban mining is also very important and recycling.

We do have those technologies,

but they are not so well developed for

the more complicated products and materials as we have heard in week four.

So, here too the availability of technology is a very important driver of supply.

Next one is globalization.

In general, this is also an important driver,

but metals are already on the global markets.

So, there's not much gain to be

made from globalization that already has occurred in the past.

And hopefully, it will remain a global market because if it doesn't we

would have to go back to the regional supply of metals that would be very inefficient.

Policy is also something that can influence supply.

Resource policies are still in their early stages,

but when they're developed and when they really mean something,

they could have a powerful influence.

In the European Union,

the policy makers think in the direction of reopening

mines in Europe or even exploiting new mines in Europe,

and this could have a significant influence on the supply of metals.

Also accessing global mines could have an important influence on the supply.

And this is also something that can be part of those resource policies.

For climate change, we have these very nice scenarios, the IPCC scenarios.

For metals use or for resource use in general,

we don't have them yet.

And the International Resource Panel is in the process of making them.

There is a specific clip where that is explained.

That's it for this lecture, in the next lecture,

I will work out these ideas into a specific scenario for aluminum.

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