Waste is dead, long live the resource !
The real reasons why we should focus on resources
Everyone in what used to be the French waste industry keeps talking about the economy of resource, from eco-agencies as Citéo, the merger of Eco-folio and Eco-Emballages, to the main waste management companies as Veolia. What is for some a marketing strategy to rebuild their image within a circular economy clearly has the merit to remind everyone that waste does not only refer to pollution in landfills or through incineration gases but to a material with an economic and environmental value. But what exactly is this value?
Let’s focus in that article on some of the raw materials of our industries: biomass, construction minerals, metallic and industrial minerals, and fossil oils. Water scarcity is obviously a major challenge of our century and wind, sunlight and sea waves are also resources increasingly used but are practically unlimited.
We currently live on credit as the Earth Overshoot Day points out, symbolizing the day of the year from which we consume more ecological resources than Earth can regenerate in a year and produce more waste than it can absorb within that time frame. That day keeps coming earlier and earlier but what does it really mean about raw material depletion?
The ratio between known ore reserves and annual production, called R/P ratio or burn rate, should reflect the depletion risk (see figure below) but has two main limits.
- Ore deposit discoveries must continuously be taken into account. Consequently, the Zinc burn rate for example has remained the same around 60 years since 1950, as reserves went from 100 Mt to 720 Mt while annual production rose from 2.4 Mt per year to 18.7 Mt per year.
- On the other hand, the global demand keeps increasing, driven by developing countries growth which may to some extent be accelerated by the metal-intensive energy transition (solar panels, wind farms, etc.). As a result, the copper depletion year would not be in 40 years but in only 26 years.
The french environmental Agency ADEME published in june 2017 an enlightening technical note which concluded that
Eeven if the depletion of mineral resources before the end of the century is very unlikely for most mineral raw materials, shortages over long durations are to be expected.
Major investments needed to discover and exploit new ore deposits will take time to be made as they depend on global demand for raw materials. Prospecting and exploiting will be increasingly difficult and expensive with the need to cover areas with extreme climatic conditions, explore at great off-shore depth and extract ore with lower density in minerals.
Beyond the stakes of raw materials scarcity, the energy needs of extraction and production are enormous as in 2012, metals production made up 10 % of global energy consumption (as much as 6.5 % for steel). An associated increase in greenhouse gas emissions is feared as copper is estimated to consume 2.4% of the world’s energy consumption in 2050 against as little as 0.3% in 2012 (Elshkaki et al, 2016). The decline in mineral density and deeper deposits only make matters worse. In addition, apart from polluting soil, sending post-production or post-consumption waste to landfill or incineration is also responsible for significant greenhouse gas emissions from the combustion process and organic decomposition.
The reason why El Salvador was the first country in the world to impose a nationwide ban on metal mining is linked to the direct environmental impacts on water supply (Imagine that in 2025 the Chilean mining industry will annually consume seven times the quantity of water the city of Lyon consumes in one year). The water injected underground can also have disastrous health impacts as effluents and ground water are loaded with pollutants.
To summarize, saving the extraction of new raw materials by using waste as a resource could mainly prevent from:
1. Shortages over long durations periods and rising prices
2. Increasing energy consumptions to extract deeper and under extreme conditions, and GHG emissions or air pollution associated
3. Huge water consumptions and pollutions
4. Soil pollution and GHG emissions from landfill and incineration
The waste economic value of some streams like metals is obvious. As regards others that are currently seen as an expensive pain fortheir producers, therehere is a need for a mind switch as sorting, pooling with neighbours and identifying local recovery streams could lead to increasing revenue streams.
The best waste is the one we do not produce
The risk below the “resources economy” motto carried by traditional waste actors is to forget that waste transformation in raw material requires resources and rejects pollutants. The entropy law of thermodynamics reminds us that coproducts and waste will not disapear but we need to maximise resource use with a conception and consumption revolution.
Let’s rent, share, repair, remanufacture, reuse, upcycle, urban mine and recycle as much as we can.
N E X T → Shifting from labour to natural resources taxes
