Methodologies to measure the sustainability of materials –focus on recycling aspects

Abstract

What environmental constraints will materials have to face in the future? Can currentmeasurement tools like LCA (Life Cycle Analysis) support the choices of material and adaptto these constraints to pave the way to a sustainable world? Are there some alternative orcomplementary approaches to enhance the quality of information for decision makers? Theaim of this article is to provide answers to these three questions. The society oftomorrow, in the second half of the 21st century, will be a society where the circulareconomy will play a more important role and thus will help reduce materials waste. This isa critical aspect of sustainability. To get there, the decisions have to be enlightenedand fair, because the decisions (or non-decisions) made today shape the world that futuregenerations will have to manage. Furthermore, Lord Kelvin used to say: “what you can’tmeasure, you can’t improve”. Therefore, these decisions have to be supported bymeasurement tools that will properly capture the stakes of reuse and recycling at the endof life of products. Today, LCA is the common tool used to address this matter. However,the present article has shown that LCA cannot incorporate the whole complexity ofsustainability. LCA is good at considering micro-scale issues, comparing one solution withanother, in a static approach. How can it give right directions to decision makers inorder to support the vision of a circular economy? The application of different standardsshowed that it is not easy at all and that recycling product at their end of life are notrewarded equally and sometimes not promoted at all. Therefore rebound effects leading tocontradictory decisions may occur. LCA alone is not enough to make enlightened decisions.It should be complemented by other methods. This was proposed in the last part. Based onthe IPAT equation, this approach tries to capture different aspects that are not addressedproperly by LCA, due to the fact that the functional unit is too restrictive, that thetime dimension and prospective approach should be more integrated, and that it shouldenlarge the scale of the analysis to the macro-economy and the socio-economy. It shouldalso recognize that the efforts have to be shared by different players including materialindustry and manufacturers, policy makers and society in general. As a general conclusion,we are convinced that tomorrow’s society will recognize the value of materials that arerecyclable and reusable, like steel has been for many decades. But there is still a clearneed to addressing, in research and development, the improvement of the metrics, combiningsocial, environmental and economic assessment, so that the sustainability value ofmaterials is properly measured. These are the objectives of the Sovamat Initiative and theSAM conferences.