Materials, beyond Life Cycle Thinking

Abstract

Materials have been central to the development of civilization, as they constitute thebackbone of our society and of our technology, as all things are made of materials and allof them are made by tools mainly made of metals, and especially iron and steel. In modernlanguage, they have become central to the sustainability of our society. Speaking about ormeasuring this relationship, however, is complex. Life Cycle Thinking is an important toolfor doing this, but it was not developed with materials in mind and it focuses only onthat small part of sustainability related to environmental impacts. Economic and societalissues require other methodologies and all these complementary visions have to beaggregated in order to report properly on sustainability matters. To advance towards sucha new tool, called the New Metrics, an Initiative called SOVAMAT was launched 10 years agoand a Community has shaped up, binging together academics from a broad array of hard andsoft disciplines, materials producers from metals to plastics, glass, paper/cardboard,concrete, carbons, wood, etc., and materials users, including meta-users who work onecodesign, for example. The agenda of the Initiative is moving forward, improving existingmethodology, extending it and aggregating various tools towards the final target of theNew Metrics. The SOVAMAT Community meets regularly in annual seminars called Society andMaterials or SAM. This paper explains the questions addressed by the Initiative and someof its early successes.