Resource sustainability assessment of the use of non-ferrous metals in advanced materials applications

摘要

With the continuing global population growth, climate change and aspirations of developing nations to follow in the footsteps of developed nations, it is no wonder that the sustainability topic is so prominent today. Since the metals boom during the first decade of the 21st century also metal resource availability has gained renewed interest from politics and academia. Many metals are applied in clean technologies with the aim to reduce society’s environmental footprint. Semi-conductor materials, for example, are used in solar panels to harvest solar energy. As the processing of metals is often quite resource intensive the question arises how many resources are required in the production of these advanced materials. With regard to the sustainability of metal use this thesis tried to contribute in two ways. On the one hand by suggesting improvements for the assessment of impacts on future metal resource availability and on the other hand by assessing the overall resource consumption for the production of selected advanced materials, namely germanium wafers used in solar panels and cathode materials for lithium ion batteries..Data on global mining operations from a mining database was used to determine an indicator for metal resource availability on the basis of the amount of ore required per kg of metal. Another part of the work consisted in setting up a model to determine energy requirements for the production of copper on the basis of data from a mining database. This model was used to investigate the link between ore requirements and energy demand on a global level.The resource consumption of germanium wafers was assessed and set in relation to the potential resource savings achieved when the wafers are used in solar panels to produce electricity from solar energy. New cathode materials for lithium ion batteries are constantly developed. The impact of composition and property changes on the resource consumption was compared for five different cathode materials.