Description
In Absolute Environmental Sustainability Assessments (AESA) environmental impacts attributed to a product system are compared to its assigned share of a carrying capacity (also referred to as boundary or sustainability reference). For the climate and ecosystems, boundaries are well established, while for mineral resources, the definition of boundaries is not straightforward. This is because mineral resources are often seen as indestructible or renewable and play an instrumental role from a human perspective. Due to the various techno-economic aspects involved, different views exist on what it is that we actually want to protect when addressing mineral resources in sustainability assessments (this is also referred to as the area of protection). Several attempts at defining absolute sustainability boundaries for mineral resources have been made. However, the existing boundaries are expressed in different metrics and scattered across research areas. It is, therefore, relevant to collect, compare, and evaluate existing definitions. For this purpose, we carried out a systematic literature review of existing absolute boundaries for mineral resource use, defined criteria for their inclusion in the review, defined a baseline for each parameter needed for conversion, and expressed each of the existing boundaries relative to this baseline to enable quantitative comparison. The compared boundaries expressed in tonnes of raw material consumption vary by more than 2 orders of magnitude in the year 2050. This variation mainly reflects different views on how boundaries should be defined. We further evaluated the existing boundary definitions using established criteria for the definition of environmental boundaries and identified several challenges. The identified limitations concerning the area of protection and other design parameters related to it highlight the need to rethink if and how an absolute sustainability boundary for mineral resource use should be defined.| Period | 6 Nov 2024 |
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| Event title | The 16th Biennial International Conference on EcoBalance: Life Cycle Thinking - Beyond Carbon |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Sendai, JapanShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |