Models for Decarbonization in the Chemical Industry.

Various technologies and strategies have been proposed to decarbonize the chemical industry. Assessing the decarbonization, environmental, and economic implications of these technologies and strategies is critical to identifying pathways to a more sustainable industrial future. This study reviews recent advancements and integration of systems analysis models, including process analysis, material flow analysis, life cycle assessment, techno-economic analysis, and machine learning.

Vanadium: A U.S. Perspective on an Understudied Metal.

Vanadium is an element that is little known except to those who manufacture high-performance iron alloys and other widely used metal products that are indispensable for creating improved product performance across a variety of final-use sectors. We report here on deriving a detailed material flow cycle for vanadium in the United States for 1992-2021, the most recent year for which detailed data are available. The steels [tool steel, alloy steels, and high-strength low-alloy (HSLA) steels] are responsible for about half of the cumulative vanadium demand (167 Gg), with significantly smaller fractions being used to create catalysts, titanium-vanadium alloys, and several smaller product groups.

Alloy information helps prioritize material criticality lists.

Materials scientists employ metals and alloys that involve most of the periodic table. Nonetheless, materials scientists rarely take material criticality and reuse potential into account. In this work, we expand upon lists of "critical materials" generated by national and regional governments by showing that many materials are employed predominantly as alloying elements, which can be a deterrent to recovery and reuse at end of product life and, likely as a consequence, have low functional end-of-life recycling rates, among other problematic characteristics.

Uncertain Future of American Lithium: A Perspective until 2050.

During the 20th century, the United States went from being the largest producer and user of lithium to being heavily reliant on imports from Asia, particularly lithium-ion batteries. To explore different futures for U.S.

Material Flow Analysis from Origin to Evolution.

Material flow analysis (MFA), a central methodology of industrial ecology, quantifies the ways in which the materials that enable modern society are used, reused, and lost. Sankey diagrams, termed the "visible language of industrial ecology", are often employed to present MFA results. This Perspective assesses the history and current status of MFA, reviews the development of the methodology, presents current examples of metal, polymer, and fiber MFAs, and demonstrates that MFAs have been responsible for creating related industrial ecology specialties and stimulating connections between industrial ecology and a variety of engineering and social science fields.

YSTAFDB, a unified database of material stocks and flows for sustainability science.

We present the Yale Stocks and Flows Database (YSTAFDB), which comprises most of the material stocks and flows (STAF) data generated at the Center for Industrial Ecology at Yale University since the early 2000s. These data describe material cycles, criticality, and recycling in terms of 62 elements and various engineering materials, e.g.

Analyzing critical material demand: A revised approach.

Apparent consumption has been widely used as a metric to estimate material demand. However, with technology advancement and complexity of material use, this metric has become less useful in tracking material flows, estimating recycling feedstocks, and conducting life cycle assessment of critical materials. We call for future research efforts to focus on building a multi-tiered consumption database for the global trade network of critical materials.

Resource Demand Scenarios for the Major Metals.

The growth in metal use in the past few decades raises concern that supplies may be insufficient to meet demands in the future. From the perspective of historical and current use data for seven major metals-iron, manganese, aluminum, copper, nickel, zinc, and lead-we have generated several scenarios of potential metal demand from 2010 to 2050 under alternative patterns of global development. We have also compared those demands with various assessments of potential supply to midcentury.

Global Human Appropriation of Net Primary Production and Associated Resource Decoupling: 2010-2050.

Human appropriation of net primary production (HANPP) methodology has previously been developed to assess the intensity of anthropogenic extraction of biomass resources. However, there is limited analysis concerning future trends of HANPP. Here we present four scenarios for global biomass demand and HANPP (the most key component of HANPP) from 2010 to 2050 by incorporating data on expanded historical drivers and disaggregated biomass demand (food, wood material, and fuelwood).

Assessing the Reliability of Material Flow Analysis Results: The Cases of Rhenium, Gallium, and Germanium in the United States Economy.

Decision-makers traditionally expect "hard facts" from scientific inquiry, an expectation that the results of material flow analyses (MFAs) can hardly meet. MFA limitations are attributable to incompleteness of flowcharts, limited data quality, and model assumptions. Moreover, MFA results are, for the most part, based less on empirical observation but rather on social knowledge construction processes.

Toward Financially Viable Phytoextraction and Production of Plant-Based Palladium Catalysts.

Although a promising technique, phytoextraction has yet to see significant commercialization. Major limitations include metal uptake rates and subsequent processing costs. However, it has been shown that liquid-culture-grown Arabidopsis can take up and store palladium as nanoparticles.

Metal Dissipation and Inefficient Recycling Intensify Climate Forcing.

In the metals industry, recycling is commonly included among the most viable options for climate change mitigation, because using secondary (recycled) instead of primary sources in metal production carries both the potential for significant energy savings and for greenhouse gas emissions reduction. Secondary metal production is, however, limited by the relative quantity of scrap available at end-of-life for two reasons: long product lifespans during use delay the availability of the material for reuse and recycling; and end-of-life recycling rates are low, a result of inefficient collection, separation, and processing. For a few metals, additional losses exist in the form of in-use dissipation.

Deriving the Metal and Alloy Networks of Modern Technology.

Metals have strongly contributed to the development of the human society. Today, large amounts of and various metals are utilized in a wide variety of products. Metals are rarely used individually but mostly together with other metals in the form of alloys and/or other combinational uses.

Structural Investigation of Aluminum in the U.S. Economy using Network Analysis.

Metals are used in numerous products and are sourced via increasingly global and complex supply chains. Monetary input-output tables (MIOT) and network analysis can be applied to intersectoral supply chains and used to analyze structural aspects. We first provide a concise review of the literature related to network analysis applied to MIOTs.

Building the Material Flow Networks of Aluminum in the 2007 U.S. Economy.

Based on the combination of the U.S. economic input-output table and the stocks and flows framework for characterizing anthropogenic metal cycles, this study presents a methodology for building material flow networks of bulk metals in the U.

By-product metals are technologically essential but have problematic supply.

The growth in technological innovation that has occurred over the past decades has, in part, been possible because an increasing number of metals of the periodic table are used to perform specialized functions. However, there have been increasing concerns regarding the reliability of supply of some of these metals. A main contributor to these concerns is the fact that many of these metals are recovered only as by-products from a limited number of geopolitically concentrated ore deposits, rendering their supplies unable to respond to rapid changes in demand.

Criticality of metals and metalloids.

Imbalances between metal supply and demand, real or anticipated, have inspired the concept of metal criticality. We here characterize the criticality of 62 metals and metalloids in a 3D "criticality space" consisting of supply risk, environmental implications, and vulnerability to supply restriction. Contributing factors that lead to extreme values include high geopolitical concentration of primary production, lack of available suitable substitutes, and political instability.

In-use product stocks link manufactured capital to natural capital.

In-use stock of a product is the amount of the product in active use. In-use product stocks provide various functions or services on which we rely in our daily work and lives, and the concept of in-use product stock for industrial ecologists is similar to the concept of net manufactured capital stock for economists. This study estimates historical physical in-use stocks of 91 products and 9 product groups and uses monetary data on net capital stocks of 56 products to either approximate or compare with in-use stocks of the corresponding products in the United States.

Lost by Design.

In some common uses metals are lost by intent-copper in brake pads, zinc in tires, and germanium in retained catalyst applications being examples. In other common uses, metals are incorporated into products in ways for which no viable recycling approaches exist, examples include selenium in colored glass and vanadium in pigments. To determine quantitatively the scope of these "losses by design", we have assessed the major uses of 56 metals and metalloids, assigning each use to one of three categories: in-use dissipation, currently unrecyclable when discarded, or potentially recyclable when discarded.

Improved alternatives for estimating in-use material stocks.

Determinations of in-use material stocks are useful for exploring past patterns and future scenarios of materials use, for estimating end-of-life flows of materials, and thereby for guiding policies on recycling and sustainable management of materials. This is especially true when those determinations are conducted for individual products or product groups such as "automobiles" rather than general (and sometimes nebulous) sectors such as "transportation". We propose four alternatives to the existing top-down and bottom-up methods for estimating in-use material stocks, with the choice depending on the focus of the study and on the available data.

Criticality of iron and its principal alloying elements.

Because modern technology depends on reliable supplies of a wide variety of materials and because of increasing concern about those supplies, a comprehensive methodology was created to quantify the degree of criticality of the metals of the periodic table. In this paper, we apply this methodology to iron and several of its main alloying elements (i.e.

On the materials basis of modern society.

It is indisputable that modern life is enabled by the use of materials in its technologies. Those technologies do many things very well, largely because each material is used for purposes to which it is exquisitely fitted. The result over time has been a steady increase in product performance.

Uncovering the end uses of the rare earth elements.

The rare earth elements (REE) are a group of fifteen elements with unique properties that make them indispensable for a wide variety of emerging and conventional established technologies. However, quantitative knowledge of REE remains sparse, despite the current heightened interest in future availability of the resources. Mining is heavily concentrated in China, whose monopoly position and potential restriction of exports render primary supply vulnerable to short term disruption.