Mankind must conserve sustainable materials

As the supply of natural resources dwindles, the world must focus on meeting human needs with a minimum of materials and energy usage.

THE CULTURE of consumption that has spread from North America to Western Europe, Japan, and a wealthy few in developing countries has brought with it an unprecedented appetite for physical goods and the materials from which they are made. People in industrial countries account for 20% of global population, yet consume 86% of the world's aluminum, 81% of its paper, 80% of its iron and steel, and 76% of its timber.

Sophisticated technologies have let extractive industries produce these vast quantities of raw materials and have helped to keep most materials prices in decline. However, the growing scale of those industries also has exacted an ever-increasing cost. Raw materials production has brought about unparalleled ecological destruction during the last half-century.

The environmental costs of waste disposal, ranging from toxic incinerator emissions to the poisoning of groundwater by landfills, have been documented with increasing frequency. Even greater damage is caused by the initial extraction and processing of raw materials by an immense complex of mines, smelters, petroleum refineries, chemical plants, logging operations, and pulp mills. Just four primary production industries--paper, plastics, chemicals, and metals--account for 71% of the toxic emissions from all U.S. manufacturing. The search for virgin resources increasingly has collided with the few indigenous peoples who had remained relatively undisturbed by the outside world.

Though not many of the world's mostly city-dwelling consumer class comprehend the impacts and scale of the extractive economy that supports their lifestyles, the production of virgin materials alters the global landscape at rates that rival the forces of nature. Mining moves more soil and rock--an estimated 28,000,000,000 tons per year--than is carried to the seas by the world's rivers. Mining operations often result in increased erosion and siltation of nearby lakes and streams, as well as acid drainage and metal contamination by ores containing sulfur compounds. Entire mountains, valleys, and rivers have been ruined by mining. In the U.S., 59 former mineral operations are slated for remediation under the Federal Superfund hazardous-waste cleanup program, at a cost of billions of dollars.

Cutting wood for materials plays a major role in global deforestation, which has accelerated dramatically in recent decades. Since 1950, nearly one-fifth of the Earth's forested area has been cleared. Industrial logging has more than doubled since 1950, and is particularly culpable in the destruction of primary rain forests in Central Africa and Southeast Asia. Production of agricultural materials has dramatic environmental impacts as well. In the former Soviet republics of Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan, for instance, decades of irrigated cotton production have contaminated large areas of farmland with toxic chemicals and salt.

The chemical industry has become a major source of materials, including plastics, which increasingly have been substituted for heavier materials, and synthetic fibers, which have become crucial to the textile industry. The impacts of chemical production--from hazardous-waste dump sites such as Love Canal to industrial accidents like the release of dioxin from a Seveso, Italy, plant in 1977--generally are more familiar than those from mining, logging, and agriculture, since chemical facilities usually are located closer to urban areas.

Raw materials industries are among the planet's biggest consumers of energy. Mining and smelting alone take an estimated five to 10% of global energy use each year. Five primary materials industries--paper, steel, aluminum, plastics, and container glass--account for 31% of U.S. manufacturing energy use. This thirst for energy contributes significantly to such problems as global warming, acid rain, and the flooding of valleys and destruction of rivers for hydroelectric dams.

Despite the environmental impacts of the materials economy, the principal subject of debate over materials policy in the last several decades has been how soon Earth is likely to run out of nonrenewable resources. Yet, the ecosystems that provide renewable resources could collapse long before that point is reached.

Since the 1970s, growth in industrial nations' raw materials consumption has slowed. Some observers believe that these countries have reached a consumption plateau, for much of their materials-intensive infrastructure--roads and buildings--already is in place, and markets for cars, appliances, and other bulky goods largely are saturated. The plateau they sit on is a lofty one, though, and the consumer culture still is going strong.

Materials use has reached extraordinary levels in industrial countries because of an outdated global economic framework that depresses virgin materials' prices and, most important, fails to account for the environmental costs of their extraction and processing. Prices have continued to fall even as ecological expenses of the global materials economy have risen sharply. During the past decade, almost every major commodity has gotten significantly cheaper throughout the world--a trend that, in turn, allowed consumption rates to continue their steady growth.

International trade rules and the policies of industrial nations tend to reinforce materials consumption patterns that date back to the colonial era, when empires were assembled to secure access to raw materials for manufacturing industries in home countries. The development assistance policies of former colonial powers tend to favor the production and export of primary commodities, which they often still receive in large quantities from the countries they once ruled. World Bank and International Monetary Fund planners generally advise commodity-exporting developing nations--many of which are deeply in debt--to invest heavily in those sectors to gain foreign exchange. Such policies, combined with tariffs that are lower for primary commodities than for processed intermediates or manufactured goods, have tended to depress prices of primary material commodities as compared with recovered materials.

At the other end of the cycle, industrial countries commonly subsidize waste disposal as well. In the U.S., where national policy officially favors waste reduction, reuse, and recycling over landfilling and incineration, actual practice has been the reverse. Local communities have spent billions of dollars to finance construction of disposal facilities, while cheaper, more environmentally sound waste management options have received little funding. A large share of these waste disposal costs are hidden in property taxes or utility assessments, rather than being paid for directly per unit of waste. Thus, there is little incentive not to throw things away.

Favoring disposal over waste reduction, re-use, and recycling squanders not only materials, but the large amounts of energy embodied in products that are buried of burned. A 1992 study of recycling and incineration found that, while significant amounts of energy can be recovered through burning, three to five times more can be saved by recycling municipal solid waste. Increasing the recovery of materials in U.S. solid waste so that at least 60% of all the materials are recycled could save the equivalent of 315,000,000 barrels of oil a year.

Preserving the natural resource base will require the creation of an economy that produces much less waste and can function with relatively small inputs of virgin materials. Sooner or later, of course, the over-all efficiency of the system will have to improve on a massive scale; all the goods and services the economy produces will have to be designed to need far fewer materials. On a more immediate level, though, it is necessary to look at wastes" and secondary materials in an entirely different light. The throwaway culture of "convenience" and planned obsolescence must be discarded in favor of an approach that seeks value in products even after people think they have finished using them.

The practical consequences of this attitude will be complex and varied. Perhaps most important, entrepreneurial and employment opportunities would grow rapidly in the recovery and reprocessing of used materials. A wide variety of items--from bottles to shipping containers--could be re-used dozens of times, then collected for remanufacturing. Car owners might bring their tires to a local auto parts dealer to get retreaded and, later perhaps, melted down into completely different products. Composted kitchen. yard, and sewage wastes would be plowed back into gardens and farms. Recycled-paper mills would outnumber those equipped only for virgin fiber, and smelters fed by recycled metals would replace a major share of mining operations. In general, cities--where used resources, factories, and labor are concentrated--would become a more important source of materials than rural mines or forests.

Bringing about change on this scale is going to require more than today's incremental increases in governments' environmental budgets, curbside pickup of newspapers, and the occasional trip to the community bottle bank. The job demands an infusion of capital, design skill, imagination, and public commitment comparable to America's economic mobilization during World War II. Like that process, this one will have to proceed from public policies, but its principal players will be industrialists, financiers, engineers, designers, and thousands of small businesses. In the long run, efficient use of materials should mean not only less environmental damage, but also a more stable economy, better longterm investment opportunities, and more skilled jobs, especially in design industries.

The most obvious place to start is with the current subsidization of virgin materials extraction. Raw material production should be taxed, not subsidized. A reformed tax system could force industries to cover the full environmental costs of their activities, instead of leaving the bill for the public to pay. By raising prices to more realistic levels, such a system would provide strong incentives not to degrade the natural resource base in the first place. Market forces need to be aligned for, rather than against, materials efficiency.

A related policy could force households and businesses to pay the full cost of disposing of their waste--with the clear understanding that a more efficient economy would make it well worth their while.

Truly taking responsibility for garbage will involve far more than just paying a little extra for its disposal. The ultimate goal is to develop comprehensive systems for collecting waste and transforming it into new products, which will be possible only if many consumer goods are redesigned to be re-used and recycled easily.

Recovering secondary materials and reintegrating them into the economy will be crucial in the struggle to reduce the need for virgin resources. Over the long term, though, it will be necessary to make basic design changes in the materials economy to eliminate materials needs and wastes at the source.

Two decades ago, when the world faced an energy crisis, skeptics scoffed at the idea that efficiency was the key to a sustainable energy policy. Since then, new lighting, heating, cooling, insulation, and manufacturing technologies have made it possible to cut energy use by three-fourths or more in many applications. The improved technologies often are cheap enough to make energy efficiency a better investment than energy production.

Houses can be designed to save materials without sacrificing comfort. Even the boards they are made of could be produced more efficiently. In recent years, managers of industrial sawmills, frustrated at how much wood was being lost as sawdust, determined that they could realize considerable savings simply by using thinner blades to saw logs; the thinner blades cut just as well as the originals, but left more of the wood intact. By combining similar technologies already available--ranging from two-sided copying in offices to the adoption of efficient architectural techniques--the U.S. could cut its wood consumption in half.

Efficiency policies will have to cover a wide range of issues, but on the most basic level they all need to spark smarter design. Three principles may help designers, architects, engineers, planners, and builders work together to make that happen. The first is to promote sharing. For years, consumers have obtained reading materials from free public libraries instead of buying increasingly expensive books that they probably would read only once. Many people likely would welcome the opportunity to apply the same concept of sharing and re-use to thousands of other everyday items--power tools, bottles and jars, cars, or computer data, for example.

A second principle is to maintain the value added to materials. Extraction, processing, refining, and manufacturing all add value to a raw material. These processes also have major environmental costs. if a computer becomes worthless a few months after its purchase because a much better, cheaper model has hit the market, the economy has wasted all the effort and environmental damage that went into the device's manufacture. The item would lose value much more slowly if it were designed specifically to be repaired or upgraded easily. The more durable a product is, the less frequently the cycle of processing or reprocessing has to start over again.

The third is to design goods and services in context. A product design is most likely to be materials- and energy-efficient if it is considered as part of the entire system in which it functions. It often is more efficient to substitute a broad systemic change for an individual product.

Synergistic gains between components of design are not realized simply by plugging in energy-efficient technologies or materials. They emerge only when design professionals work together from beginning to end--as they did, for example, when the National Audubon Society built its new headquarters in New York City. Audubon achieved massive improvements in lighting, heating, cooling, ventilation, and over-all indoor air quality. The architects drew up floor plans to take full advantage of natural light; the contractor installed windows that let just the right amount of light and heat pass through them; the lighting technician knew, accordingly, that the building would need fewer lamp fixtures; and the interior designer arranged surfaces and finishes to get the most out of the lamps.

Such integrated design costs perhaps three times as much as conventional design. Nevertheless, according to Amory Lovins, whose Rocky Mountain Institute has done pioneering studies on the subject, the resulting efficiency improvements can yield as much as 25% more floor space in a building of the same size. The extra expense may be recovered immediately in materials savings-fewer ducts will be necessary, for instance, if climate-control systems are smaller-and a good design would yield substantial energy-saving dividends over the life of the structure.

This truly thoughtful design no doubt would be more common if society rewarded it more directly. An engineer's commission usually is based on a percentage of the over-all project budget--a practice that in many cases rewards oversizing. Taking the opposite approach, the Canadian utility Ontario Hydro recently announced that it would reward design that met certain energy-efficiency standards with a rebate equivalent to three years' energy savings, to be shared by the developer, architect, and consulting engineers. By basing the rebate on the finished product--the building's actual energy performance-the utility was adding an incentive for the design professionals to stay involved and ensure that their ideas were executed properly during the structure's construction, operation, and maintenance. Although materials efficiency is harder to measure than energy efficiency, similar methods of compensating designers for work that reduces materials intensiveness could be just as effective.

Even with such incentives, smarter design will remain difficult until information systems are in place that give fuller descriptions of products and materials. The "green labels" now seen in several countries are intended to encourage purchases of environmentally preferable products, but they provide little detailed data and are directed primarily at consumers. More promising would be in-depth green labeling for designers and builders. Information on a material's origin, its capacity for re-use and recycling, the environmental costs of its production, etc. will have to become an essential part of its design specifications.

Systematically reworking materials specifications to include environmental information would be a step in the right direction. Accomplishing this reform on a broad scale, though, will require a much clearer understanding of how materials production and use actually affect the environment. Currently, detailed information on that topic is just as scarce as information about waste. Yet, materials-efficient design ultimately will be impossible without it. Data must be developed at every level of society, from corporate materials audits--which should help firms identify opportunities for efficiency improvements--up to national and international accounting of materials flows. These statistics also need to be linked with data on the amount of energy, pollution, and economic activity associated with materials production and use.

There have been at least a few promising initiatives in this area. In the U.S., the Bureau of Mines has started compiling limited, but extremely useful, information on materials production, consumption, and recycling. The eventual goal is to track comprehensively the quantities of materials flowing into and out of the American economy, allowing progress in materials efficiency to be measured. Similarly, the Department of Energy has begun to collect more detailed energy--use statistics. Combining the two data sets undoubtedly will uncover valuable opportunities for saving energy through more efficient materials use.

Data on pollution and hazardous waste generation from production processes, exemplified by the information collected annually in the U.S. Toxics Release Inventory (TRI), also has been useful. Unique in the world, the Environmental Protection Agency's TRI lists the reported output of several hundred toxic substances by American manufacturers. Data are available by the specific facility or company, by geographical area or industrial sector, or by chemical. The TRI has its flaws--including limited coverage of industries and chemicals, and poor quality control on its data--but it is a good starting point for the son of comprehensive system that is needed. It would be very useful if such a system included data on raw materials that flow into industrial facilities--a reform Massachusetts has implemented on a limited basis through its toxics use reduction law.

In the long run, materials-data collection efforts--like energy-use tracking--make sound economic sense, since they could inspire efficiency improvements that would far outweigh the cost of amassing the information. They could also help in making materials choices by facilitating quick assessments of the energy use, pollution, jobs, and waste associated with production of a given material or product--a virtually impossible task today.

The authors are, respectively, senior researcher and staff researcher, Worldwatch Institute, Washington, D. C., and authors of The Next Efficiency Revolution: Creating a Sustainable Materials Economy.

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