Some strategic raw materials do have an extremely unsecure supply situation. Several working groups around the world have made criticality assessments for metallic raw materials to analyze the ...driving impact factors for this instability. However, the influences on raw material availability are manifold and therefore criticality assessment methods are very heterogeneous. Here we give an overview about the differences and similarities of supply risk evaluation in 15 criticality assessment methods. We take the example of Indium, which has been rated in 60% of these criticality studies, and show which data base is used for supply risk evaluation. Our results show a lack of consensus about which indicators give reliable information for raw material supply risk and how these indicators should be aggregated. We anticipate our essay to be a starting point for more justified indicator selection and weighting in criticality assessments.
•We compare 15 raw material supply risk evaluation methods in criticality assessments.•We analyze supply risk evaluation, including indicator selection and weighting.•Indium is used to exemplify data base situation.•Indicator selection and weighting is found to be arbitrary.•Required data for specific resources is often unreliable or unavailable.
Since manufacturers are the main drivers in the selection of the materials used in their products, they have a special responsibility for investigating the accompanying sustainability aspects. The ...recently increased attention they pay to these issues is motivated not only by a sense of social responsibility, but also by pressure from customers and competitors. In particular, the three dimensions of sustainability – based on the triple bottom line of economic, environmental and social criteria – are of growing importance for sustainable supply chain management. Raw materials and their supply chains are often at the focus of attention, since manufacturers may need to diversify them for their products. Appropriate assessment models then become essential. Although raw material assessments and raw material-focused decision support schemes have recently been applied more often in the corporate context, several aspects such as indicator selection, weighting or social assessment are rarely considered. As a result, a comprehensive, sustainability-oriented raw material assessment and decision support scheme in the corporate context is not available in the scientific literature. In the design of such a scheme, four questions arise: First, how should a corporate-oriented raw material assessment model be structured? Second, how can all three sustainability dimensions be taken into account? Third, how can the application of raw material assessments in a corporate-oriented decision-making process increase the sustainability level of a company? And fourth, does a methodically structured raw material assessment model have advantages over existing models? To answer these questions, we have developed a model which takes into account state-of-the-art sustainability assessments as well as recent developments in the field of criticality analysis, life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) and social life cycle assessment (SLCA). With partners from both academia and industry we identify relevant quantitative indicators for structuring the assessment model and for calculating corresponding indicator weightings, using the analytic hierarchy process (AHP). To demonstrate the applicability of the assessment model for decision support and its benefits for companies in identifying potential hotspots in raw material supply chains, we present a case study that includes decision support for selecting capacitor technologies. A sensitivity analysis demonstrates the robustness of the assessments. In short, this article presents a sustainability-oriented raw material assessment and decision support model and proposes how it should be applied in a corporate context.
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•Integration of raw material assessments in business processes.•All three sustainability dimensions considered for decision support.•Structured indicator selection and indicator weighting determination with AHP.•Quantitative raw material-specific global hotspot identification on country level.•Case study with aluminum, niobium and tantalum capacitors.
•Dissipative losses are unrecoverable material flows into a receiving medium.•Dissipation ratios compare annual dissipation to extraction and final production.•Expected lifetime in the anthroposphere ...quantifies the speed of dissipation.•Aluminum, iron, and nickel show lowest dissipation ratios among 18 metals.•Technology metals and by-products have high dissipation ratios and low lifetime.
Dissipative losses of metals are unrecoverable material flows representing the real consumption of metals. They occur during any process in the global metal cycle from primary production to waste management and have different receiving mediums. Avoiding dissipative losses can reduce both primary material requirements and potential negative environmental impacts of metals. However, there are currently no quantitative indicators available for the assessment of global dissipative losses of metals covering all processes before and after the use-phase. Here we present three indicators, the Dissipation-to-Extraction Ratio, the Dissipation-to-Final-Production Ratio, and the Expected Lifetime in the Anthroposphere. These indicators are further applied to 18 metals. The results show that the severity of dissipative losses throughout the periodic table differs a lot. Dissipation ratios are lowest for mass metals like iron, aluminum, and nickel, and highest for technology metals like gallium, germanium, and tellurium. Expected lifetimes vary between just months for metals with high dissipation ratios and up to a century for aluminum and iron. The assessment shows that there are important measures in material efficiency and recycling efforts to be taken to decrease dissipative losses for a wide range of metals. For each metal, the most effective options for action can be identified based on our results.
Companies, economies and technologies are vulnerable to supply disruptions or price peaks of specific raw materials. Multiple research groups worldwide have proposed methodologies for determining the ...criticality of raw materials, including assessments on the vulnerability to supply restrictions. These raw material vulnerability assessments use manifold indicators but are not consistent concerning their selection, calculation, interpretation and weighting. Their indicators estimate a raw material’s economic importance or its significance for a strategic goal, or they inform regarding the impact of supply disruptions. Here, we provide an overview of 18 vulnerability assessments in 16 recent criticality studies. Our results reveal 18 different vulnerability indicators, among which a set of six indicators is frequently used and therefore might be recommended for decision makers. The range of possible vulnerability assessment results is exemplified by evaluations of the transition metal copper and the rare earth neodymium. Our overview can serve as a starting point for future raw material criticality assessments concerning the selection of vulnerability indicators and appropriate calculation and weighting methods.
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•We review 16 raw material criticality studies evaluating vulnerability.•In those studies, 18 vulnerability assessments use in total 18 different indicators.•Indicator sets vary according to different scope and target of the assessments.•Six frequently used indicator groups are identified and discussed in detail.•Results and data collection exemplified for copper and the rare earth neodymium.
Summary
There is a growing concern over the security and sustainable supply of raw material among businesses and governments of developed, material‐intensive countries. This has led to the ...development of a systematic analysis of risk incorporated with raw materials usage, often referred as criticality assessment. In principle, this concept is based on the material flow approach. The potential role of life cycle assessment (LCA) to integrate resource criticality through broadening its scope into the life cycle sustainability assessment (LCSA) framework has been discussed within the LCA communities for some time. In this article, we aim at answering the question of how to proceed toward integration of the geopolitical aspect of resource criticality into the LCSA framework. The article focuses on the assessment of the geopolitical supply risk of 14 resources imported to the seven major advanced economies and the five most relevant emerging countries. Unlike a few previous studies, we propose a new method of calculation for the geopolitical supply risk, which is differentiated by countries based on the import patterns instead of a global production distribution. Our results suggest that rare earth elements, tungsten, antimony, and beryllium generally pose high geopolitical supply risk. Results from the Monte Carlo simulation allow consideration of data uncertainties for result interpretation. Issues concerning the consideration of the full supply chain are exemplarily discussed for cobalt. Our research broadens the scope of LCA from only environmental performance to a resource supply‐risk assessment tool that includes accessibility owing to political instability and market concentration under the LCSA framework.
Summary
The diversity of raw materials used in modern products, compounded by the risk of supply disruptions—due to uneven geological distribution of resources, along with socioeconomic factors like ...production concentration and political (in)stability of raw material producing countries—has drawn attention to the subject of raw material “criticality.” In this article, we review the state of the art regarding the integration of criticality assessment, herein termed “product‐level supply risk assessment,” as a complement to environmental life cycle assessment. We describe and compare three methods explicitly developed for this purpose—Geopolitical Supply Risk (GeoPolRisk), Economic Scarcity Potential (ESP), and the Integrated Method to Assess Resource Efficiency (ESSENZ)—based on a set of criteria including considerations of data sources, uncertainties, and other contentious methodological aspects. We test the methods on a case study of a European‐manufactured electric vehicle, and conclude with guidance for appropriate application and interpretation, along with opportunities for further methodological development. Although the GeoPolRisk, ESP, and ESSENZ methods have several limitations, they can be useful for preliminary assessments of the potential impacts of raw material supply risks on a product system (i.e., “outside‐in” impacts) alongside the impacts of a product system on the environment (i.e., “inside‐out” impacts). Care is needed to not overlook critical raw materials used in small amounts but nonetheless important to product functionality. Further methodological development could address regional and firm‐level supply risks, multiple supply‐chain stages, and material recycling, while improving coverage of supply risk characterization factors.
A terminology for downcycling Helbig, Christoph; Huether, Jonas; Joachimsthaler, Charlotte ...
Journal of industrial ecology,
August 2022, Volume:
26, Issue:
4
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The term downcycling is often used anecdotally to describe imperfections in recycling. However, it is rarely defined. Here, we identify six meanings of the term downcycling as used in scientific ...articles and reports. These encompass the material quality of reprocessed materials, target applications, product value, alloying element losses, material systems, and additional primary production. In a proposal for harmonized and more specific terminology, we define downcycling as the phenomenon of quality reduction of materials reprocessed from waste relative to their original quality. We further identify that the reduced quality can express itself thermodynamically, functionally, and economically, covering all perspectives on downcycling. Dilution, contamination, reduced demand for recycled materials, and design‐related issues can cause those downcycling effects. We anticipate that this more precise terminology can help quantify downcycling, keep materials in the loop longer, use materials more often and at higher quality, and therefore assist in reducing material‐related environmental impacts.
Purpose
The safeguard subject of the Area of Protection “natural Resources,” particularly regarding mineral resources, has long been debated. Consequently, a variety of life cycle impact assessment ...methods based on different concepts are available. The Life Cycle Initiative, hosted by the UN Environment, established an expert task force on “Mineral Resources” to review existing methods (this article) and provide guidance for application-dependent use of the methods and recommendations for further methodological development (Berger et al. in Int J Life Cycle Assess,
2020
).
Methods
Starting in 2017, the task force developed a white paper, which served as its main input to a SETAC Pellston Workshop® in June 2018, in which a sub-group of the task force members developed recommendations for assessing impacts of mineral resource use in LCA. This article, based mainly on the white paper and pre-workshop discussions, presents a thorough review of 27 different life cycle impact assessment methods for mineral resource use in the “natural resources” area of protection. The methods are categorized according to their basic impact mechanisms, described and compared, and assessed against a comprehensive set of criteria.
Results and discussion
Four method categories have been identified and their underlying concepts are described based on existing literature: depletion methods, future efforts methods, thermodynamic accounting methods, and supply risk methods. While we consider depletion and future efforts methods more “traditional” life cycle impact assessment methods, thermodynamic accounting and supply risk methods are rather providing complementary information. Within each method category, differences between methods are discussed in detail, which allows for further sub-categorization and better understanding of what the methods actually assess.
Conclusions
We provide a thorough review of existing life cycle impact assessment methods addressing impacts of mineral resource use, covering a broad overview of basic impact mechanisms to a detailed discussion of method-specific modeling. This supports a better understanding of what the methods actually assess and highlights their strengths and limitations. Building on these insights, Berger et al. (Int J Life Cycle Assess,
2020
) provide recommendations for application-dependent use of the methods, along with recommendations for further methodological development.
The diversity of materials employed in modern products and the complexity of globalized supply chains raise the importance of assessing supply risk of commodity inputs to product systems. Therefore, ...this article extends the Geopolitical Supply Risk methodology by proposing a characterization model to quantify product supply risk in relation to a functional unit under the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework. The characterization model is based on a socio-economic cause-effect mechanism drawing upon supply chain resilience concepts. Supply risk – or “criticality” – of a given “intermediate product” is defined as the multiple of probability of supply disruption and vulnerability to supply disruption. Two embodiments of the characterization model are proposed, each supplementing the previously developed probability indicators with different indicators for vulnerability. They are demonstrated with a comparative case study of an electric vehicle and internal combustion engine vehicle. The results are highly sensitive to how vulnerability is measured, and a number of methodological complications arise. The most promising embodiment of the characterization model “cancels out” the amounts of commodity inputs, as it can be strongly argued that every input to the product system is equally important for product performance as expressed by the functional unit. Thus, the Geopolitical Supply Risk characterization model shows the importance of integrating raw material criticality considerations into Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment to better inform management decisions at a product level.
•This article proposes a characterization model for Geopolitical Supply Risk.•The characterization model is based on a socio-economic cause-effect mechanism.•Supply risk is the multiple of probability and vulnerability.•Two embodiments of the characterization model are presented.•The methods are applied to conventional and electric vehicles.
Due to the material diversity of high-tech products and globalized supply chains, it is important to be able to assess geopolitical supply risks for the supply chain of any commodity. This article ...extends the Geopolitical Supply Risk assessment method under the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework to account for multi-stage supply chains as well as domestic production and applies this extended method to the supply chain of carbon fibers based on polyacrylonitrile. Particularly, the article estimates the Geopolitical Supply Risk factors emerging from international trade of petroleum, propene and acrylonitrile. Risk factors are calculated for 145 countries, and a total set of six scope-dependent indicators is identified for 54 countries. The case studies of acrylonitrile supply chains for Russia, Peru, Japan and Greece exemplify this approach and risk mitigation strategies are discussed for each of them. The results show the applicability of the modified Geopolitical Supply Risk characterization factor to a multi-stage supply chain with different internationally traded commodities in the petrochemical industry. Thereby the method serves to further integrate Life Cycle Assessment and the socio-economic dimension of natural resource impacts.
•We extend the calculation method for the geopolitical supply risk indicator.•The indicator now includes domestic production multi-stage supply chains.•We apply the method to the supply chain of petroleum, propene and acrylonitrile.•The geopolitical supply risk factors of all stages are calculated for 54 countries.•Case study for the acrylonitrile supply chain of Russia, Peru, Japan and Greece.
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