Summary of Look into the Future

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来自 Universiteit Leiden 的课程

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

15 个评分

Universiteit Leiden

A Circular Economy of Metals: Towards a Sustainable Societal Metabolism

15 个评分

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.

从本节课中

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?

Summary of Look into the Future4:58

与讲师见面

Ester van der Voet
Dr.
Institute of Environmental Sciences

We have come to the end of this course.

Before you take the final test,

I would like to say goodbye and wish you all the best,

not just with the test but also with, hopefully,

using the insights you gained in this course in your daily lives.

We have addressed the metals challenge in this course and we have

placed that in the context of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals.

The Sustainable Development Goals represent

a global quest for a better life for everyone on the planet.

As you have learnt, there are goals for many aspects of life,

eradicating poverty, promoting economic growth,

education and health, improve equality in different respects,

and also address the issues of climate change and environmental degradation.

You might think that reaching all of those goals is not realistic,

and then you will be correct in one respect.

Some of these goals,

as we have explored, are apparently contradictory.

We will really have to find our way forward in solving this,

but you will be incorrect in other respects.

The previous set of goals,

the Millennium Development Goals,

were also very ambitious.

Yet, we managed to realize a lot of them as was explained in one of the clips.

So, it's a good thing to set ambitious goals and not impossible to reach them.

That will guide societies into a direction that is good for everyone.

The metals challenge clearly shows the apparent contradiction between the different SDGs.

We have seen that metals are indispensable for economic development.

We've also seen that the production of metals causes environmental impact,

especially related to energy and climate change.

The SDGs on economic development therefore,

are apparently at aughts with the SDGs on climate and nature protection.

So, the metals challenge can be translated as how can we

meet the development goals without further degrading planetary health.

In the course, we have explored different options for that using different materials,

going for different production processes,

exploring options for a different product design,

keeping products in use longer or realizing better recycling rates.

We have found that all of these options

contribute to some extent in solving the metals challenge.

We've also found that integrating all of these options in

one overarching concept of circular economy may be the best way to go.

Keeping products in use longer helps reducing the demand for new metals.

Recycling metals, which means using old materials instead of new,

helps in a major way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Of course, all this is easier said than done.

Many things need to change in our global society before that can become effective.

For one, the stock dynamics of metal systems have shown that demand needs to stabilize

which happens of itself only when

the global population has reached a certain level of welfare.

Moreover, in the lectures on material and product design,

we have concluded that there are a lot of technological challenges to overcome.

In the lectures on recycling and remanufacturing,

we have concluded that we are far from where we want to be and

that we need to overcome many barriers in society to get there.

All this means a lot of work to be done.

A lot of governmental policies to be put in place to provide the right incentives.

A lot of company policies to change,

to realize these changes in production,

and a lot of changes in consumer behavior to install the pool for

producers and the push for all kinds of collection systems needed for recycling,

remanufacturing, and so on.

But it can be done and the SDGs may help in doing that.

And if it is done,

we will be in a much better shape.

The challenge is ours to solve.

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