Page 278 - Materials Chemistry, Second Edition

264 R.K. Rosenbaum et al.

mining and extraction technologies, but they seem to better capture the issue of
concern which is assuring a supply of resources to future generations.
Schneider et al. (2014)defined a semi-quantitative method expressed as the
economic resource scarcity potential (ESP) for evaluating resource use based on life
cycle assessment. This method includes elements typically used in the discipline of
raw materials criticality, like governance and socio-economic stability, trade bar-
riers, etc., for which each element are scaled to the range 0–1.
For metal resources, characterisation factors are mostly applied to the metal
content in the ore, not the mineral that is extracted. The relevant inventory infor-
mation is thus the amount of metal used as input, not the amount of mineral. This is
also how life cycle inventory (LCI) databases model elementary flows of mineral and
metal resources. Schneider et al. (2015) considers not only the geological stock not
yet extracted, but also the anthropogenic stock in circulation in products and goods.
The geographic scale at which it is relevant to judge the availability and de-
pletion of a resource depends on the relationship between the price and the
density/transportability of the resource. The scale is global for the valuable and
dense stock and fund resources that are easy to transport and hence traded on a
world market (metals, oil, coal, tropical hardwood), while it is regional for the less
valuable and/or less dense stock and fund resources that are used and extracted
regionally (natural gas, sand and gravel, limestone) or even locally.
For further details see Chap. 40 and Hauschild and Huijbregts (2015).

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