Economic, Environmental, and Social Assessments of Raw Materials for a Green and Resilient Economy

Dear Colleagues,

The main future challenge of our society is the mitigation of and adaptation to climate risks. This requires the penetration of future technologies (e.g., renewables and electric/hydrogen vehicles) and modern production and service concepts, such as closed-loop supply chains and a sharing economy.

A key requirement for this transformation process is the availability of primary and secondary resources as a base for functional materials. This comprises metals and minerals, as well as biogenic materials such as lignocellulose. Besides supply and availability risks, the mining, smelting, and refining of metals and minerals often implies environmental (e.g., exposure to radioactive substances in rare earth mining) and social risks (e.g., mining in conflict regions). The collection, disassembly, smelting, and refining of secondary materials can also cause environmental and social damage. Even the use of biogenic materials for a green economy entails environmental impacts that are linked to agriculture in general (e.g., degradation of soil organic matter, terrestrial acidification and eutrophication, and water consumption), and can be in conflict with food production, thereby compromising social and environmental goals.

Therefore, comprehensive and multidimensional assessments of primary and secondary resources for future-oriented technologies are needed. These assessments should address the economic, environmental, and social consequences of the supply of raw materials and functional materials.

In recent years, research on criticality and life cycle assessments has provided fundamental insights into the supply risk and environmental consequences of the mining processes of primary metals and minerals. In addition, the first social assessments have been conducted. For a sustainable transformation of our economy, this research has to be expanded in the direction of advanced functional materials, secondary raw materials, and biogenic resources in order to provide comprehensive policy recommendations for a sustainable and climate-resilient economy.

In this Special Issue, we would like to gather articles aimed at economic and/or environmental and/or social assessments in the following fields:

• Raw material criticality assessments of metals, minerals, and biomass for future-oriented technologies and/or functional materials;
• Assessments of secondary resources in regard to future-oriented technologies and/or functional materials;
• Evaluation of case studies, for example on bioplastics or WEEE, in the context of the above-mentioned topics.

Dr. Andrea Thorenz
Prof. Dr. Armin Reller
Guest Editors

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