We're Going to Need More Metal

A report from the United Nation's Environmental Program just revealed that Asia now uses more resources than the rest of the world combined. This is mostly because more people there are embracing Western-style consumerist lifestyles, not because of population growth. Now, a follow-up UNEP report shows that this also means that metal consumption is going to go through the roof.

It's all thanks to more and more people wanting smart phones and electronics, combined with a growing use of renewable energy, and really, really low rates of electronics recycling.

"Global metal needs will be three to nine times larger than all the metals currently used in the world," UNEP head Achim Steiner says.

The report notes that recycling can help reduce the need for new metals to be mined, but recycling alone will not be sufficient to alleviate the need for more mining. More and better recycling is needed for sure, but, in the view of UNEP's International Resource Panel, recycling needs to "be accompanied by a leveling off of the demand curve for metals."

It's a tough problem, with solutions that apply equally to many climate-resource-energy-pollution issues.

UNEP reminds us that mining accounts for 7-8 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, not to mention more immediate forms of visible pollution and environmental destruction. That's with today's levels of metal consumption, mind you—not the near future, where demand is projected to rise. Nearly 1 billion smartphones were sold in 2012 (a bit over half of the overall mobile phone market), each of which can contain metals comprised of 40 different elements.

Electronic waste now piles up to somewhere between 20-50 million metric tons each year. In Europe, where 12 million tons of that waste is currently generated, it's increasing at a rate of 4 percent annually. In the US, the EPA says, about 2.5 tons was created in 2010. Much of that electronic waste ends up being shipped off to places where it is of disposed of in conditions that are unhealthy for both the people breaking it down and for the local environment.

To address the problem, UNEP offers a couple of recommendations: The industry should shift its focus from concentrating on the total amount of metals to setting different priorities based on metal type. Critical metals that are getting passed over because they are present only in small amounts per item can be reclaimed; the UN says designers need to be prioritizing how a product can be disassembled for recycling at the end of its life.

UNEP notes that less than one third of the 60 metals it looked at have recycling rates above 50 percent, and 34 elements don't even having a recycling rate of 1 percent.

On the demand side, UNEP focuses on the need to increase the efficiency with which we use metals. It cites Germany's commitment to double the efficiency of raw materials usage by the end of this decade.

Conspicuously absent in recommendations is anything about addressing rapid product cycles, the economic and societal cult of consumerism, or anything that might more fundamentally change people's behavior.

The report acknowledges that recycling alone won't reduce metal consumption sufficiently to really lighten the environmental impact, yet that's where it places its focus. Yet there are systemic economic and cultural issues driving metal consumption that no amount of efficiency improvement, product-centered recycling, raw materials efficiency, and other jargon-centric solutions will solve.

The expansion of communication that increased access to mobile phones has brought to many poor nations is, on many levels, a great. Stopping that isn't so much the problem as adjusting the Western lifestyle, the aspirational lifestyle, so that it is more ecologically sustainable.

There's one last bit of green irony in all this The increase in demand for metals coming from more use of renewable energy stems from the fact that solar power, wind power, electric and hybrid cars, and the whole host of green technology that brings many genuine goods, on the whole, also comes with a much higher demand for hard-to-get metals than does dirty, polluting, fossil fuels.

At least the solar power industry has now grown enough that it's producing more electricity than is needed to make the panels themselves.