Abstract
Although focusing on managing waste as a means of managing the impact of materials on the environment has been traditionally common, research has shown that the key process for sustainability is not solely proper waste management. Rather, an approach for controlling material flows in the overall industrial and economic systems is required. Sustainable materials management (SMM) is a strategy for decoupling economic growth from natural resource consumption and is defined as “an approach to promote sustainable materials use, integrating actions targeted at reducing negative environmental impacts and preserving natural capital throughout the life-cycle of materials, taking into account economic efficiency and social equity” by The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
SMM encourages the consideration of the impacts of a suite of policies that affect a given target area, thereby encouraging consideration of policy incoherence. It is aimed at helping to reduce pressures on resources by decreasing the quantities of materials that need to be extracted. Furthermore, SMM supports sustainable decision making by balancing the social, environmental, and economic considerations throughout the life cycle of a product or material, guaranteeing that negative impacts are not shifted from the production process to the consumption phase, or vice versa. There should be a balance between material use and consumption of other natural resources, such as energy and water for SMM policies to succeed. For example, many have proposed replacement of non-renewable materials such as petroleum derivatives with bio-based, renewable materials, yet these substitute materials may consume far greater amounts of water and other ecosystem services.
In this chapter, the history of SMM will be reviewed and successful examples of implementing SMM policies in the UK, Netherlands and Japan will be presented. SMM policy principles will be illustrated and it will be shown how SMM can help to reduce dependency on raw materials through increasing resource efficiency and resource productivity. Furthermore, case studies of identifying opportunities for sustainable materials management in different industries will be discussed, e.g. mobile phones, wood fibers, etc. Also, it will be shown how Material Flow Analysis (MFA), along with life-cycle analysis and other methodologies, contribute to sustainable materials management. Moreover, a systematic view of material flow cycles and policy frameworks will be devised in order to clarify policy instruments for SMM. Finally, the challenges facing sustainable materials management will be introduced.
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Khorasanizadeh, M., Bazargan, A., McKay, G. (2019). An Introduction to Sustainable Materials Management. In: Hussain, C. (eds) Handbook of Environmental Materials Management. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73645-7_105
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-73645-7_105
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