Mineral Resource Economy 2. Группа авторов. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Группа авторов
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
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Жанр произведения: Физика
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isbn: 9781119882114
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productivity. Would it be enough to increase the speed of dematerialization in order to compensate for the increase in activity? Here again, the facts contradict this idea, particularly through the example of the increase in silicon productivity in the IT sector between 1970 and 2010, which, although without precedent (a factor of 10 million), has been associated with an increase in silicon consumption of a factor of 60 over the same period! Another study on sector productivity comes to the same conclusion (Dahmus 2014): sectors that have come closer (or have reached) absolute decoupling are not characterized by a high level of material productivity but rather by a low increase in their activity (scale effect). We should therefore once again either review our objectives or look at other leverage.

      Another form of leverage is deemed as highly promising, that of recycling. Alain Geldron’s very comprehensive contribution (Chapter 7) on the subject of metal recycling appears enlightening from several points of view. First of all, far from the sometimes blissful optimism shown by the environmental press on urban mining and the circular economy, there is a wide gap between the discourse and the empirical facts: recycling rates are still far from circularity for base metals, and are even almost zero for minor metals. Indeed, there are several fundamental differences between the extractive metal economy and the metal recycling economy, which explain why we cannot switch from one to the other without major adjustments.

      First of all, the returns to scale derived from the size of the stakeholders and the volume of deposits are quite different between the two activities, clearly contributing to the domination of the first over the second. Moreover, the share of the informal sector is still very significant in the recycling economy, whereas it remains very marginal in the extractive economy, at least when we look at the volumes supplied. Second, the qualities of the materials from primary and secondary deposits differ considerably (Fizaine 2020), again with a marked disadvantage for secondary activity (dispersed deposits, highly variable and fluctuating metal concentrations, metal complexity and diversity and coexistence with carbon chains). Finally, we find the opposition between stock management and flow management as a decisive dividing line between the old extractive economy and the new secondary economy, an opposition that is not without a reminder of the same antagonistic pattern that exists in energy production. However, it is legitimate to think that the management of a flow is more complex and less flexible than that of a stock, even more so when there is significant uncertainty about the former.

      Another illustration is the reduction of the precious metal content of electronic cards, for reasons of cost and efficiency, which has considerably reduced the attractiveness of recycling these cards, and also of all the minor metals that accompany them (Cui and Roven 2011; Adie et al. 2016). These two examples present possible incompatibilities between circular economy measures, which require careful study of the interaction effects when several measures are launched in parallel. We must also, in each situation, favor certain forms of leverage rather than generating their use across the entire circular economy.

      I.3. References

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      Barbier, E.B. (2011). Scarcity and Frontiers: How Economies Have Developed through Natural Resource Exploitation. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

      Berlingen, F. (2020). Recyclage, le grand enfumage : comment l’économie circulaire est devenue l’alibi du jetable. Éditions Rue de l’échiquier, Paris.

      Bihouix, P. (2019). Le bonheur était pour demain. Le Seuil, Paris.

      Cui, J. and Roven, H.J. (2011). Electronic waste. In Waste, Letcher, T., Vallero, D. (eds). Academic Press, Cambridge.

      Dahmus, J.B. (2014). Can efficiency improvements reduce resource consumption? Journal of Industrial Ecology, 18(6), 883–897.

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      Fizaine, F. (2020). The economics of recycling rate: New insights from waste electrical and electronic equipment, Resources Policy, 67 [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.resourpol.2020.

      Krausmann, F., Wiedenhofer, D., Lauk, C., Haas, W., Tanikawa, H., Fishman, T., Miatto, A., Schandl, H., Haberl, H. (2017). Global socioeconomic material stocks rise 23-fold over the 20th century and require half of annual resource use. PNAS, 114(8), 1880–1885.

      Pitron, G. (2018). La Guerre des métaux rares : la face cachée de la transition énergétique et numérique. Les Liens qui libèrent, Paris.

      Söderholm, P. (2011). Taxing virgin natural resources: Lessons from aggregates taxation in Europe. Resources, Conservation and Recycling, 55, 911–922.

      Wiedmann, T.O., Schandl, H., Lenzen, M., Moran, D., Suh, S., West, J., Kanemoto, K. (2015). The material footprint of nations. PNAS, 112(20), 6271–6276.