Materials in the New Millennium: Responding to Society's Needs (2001)

The final topical session examined the role of materials in energy and the environment. The overview talk in this session was presented by Robert C.Pfahl, Jr., of Motorola. Dr. Pfahl is director of international and environmental research and development at Motorola Laboratories. In 1991 he received the Stratospheric Ozone Protection Award from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for his efforts to eliminate the use of chlorofluorocarbons in the electronics industry. He is a member of the National Materials Advisory Board.

Robert A.Frosch of Harvard University spoke next. Dr. Frosch is an associate in the Robert and Renee Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at the University’s John F.Kennedy School of Government. A theoretical physicist by education, he has held senior positions at Columbia University, the Department of Defense, the United Nations Environment Program, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, and General Motors Corporation. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

John Ehrenfeld of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology was the next speaker. Dr. Ehrenfeld directs the MIT Program on Technology, Business, and Environment, an interdisciplinary educational, research, and policy program. A chemical engineer by training, he investigates how businesses manage environmental concerns and seeks organizational and technological changes to improve their practices.

Denise F.Swink presented the view from the Department of Energy (DOE). Ms. Swink is the deputy assistant secretary for industrial technologies at DOE. The mission of her office is to improve resource efficiency and fuel flexibility in the industrial sector and thereby reduce overall production costs. She has also held positions in the DOE Office of Fossil Energy and at the Environmental Protection Agency.

The session ended with a panel discussion. The following are summaries prepared by the editors who adapted them from the remarks made by the individual presenters.

Environmental concerns, such as pollution, global warming, and sustainability, have produced a variety of societal responses. These include public policy measures—such as the Geneva and Rio Conventions, the U.S.

Clean Air Act, the European Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment Directive, and the Japanese Home Electronics Recycling Law—as well as consumer action on several levels. In recent polls, 50 percent of consumers reported having switched brands after learning of harm to the environment, and 76 percent said they would switch brands for environmental reasons if price and quality were equal.

Interestingly, significant regional differences affect this. In the United States, action on the environment is driven by regulation and focused on industry. Compared with other developed countries, the U.S. devotes less R&D to the development of environmentally preferred materials and products, instead emphasizing industrial processes, such reducing the use of lead or eliminating chlorofluorocarbons. Europe is driven by a combination of regulations and customer pressure and focuses on products, rather than the industries that produce them. For example, R&D in Europe emphasizes models for environmental design and analysis. Japan is driven partly by government and partly by industry itself. The Japanese focus is on markets, and R&D there is concentrated on the development of environmentally preferred new products, such as hybrid engines and halogen-free plastics.

Despite these differences, the ultimate consequences for the materials community are the same worldwide: societal concerns and consumer preferences are becoming part of the materials selection process. The addition of environmental criteria—minimized energy use, minimized matter use, recyclability, nonhazardousness—increases the difficulty of selecting the “best” material but offers economic rewards to the successful.

Several steps can be taken to improve progress in this area. More research is needed on scientific methodologies for evaluating options during the materials R&D process. Materials researchers and system designers must become better educated about the environmental properties of materials. And the business community must learn to understand not only the economic and societal benefits of addressing environmental issues but also the risks of not addressing them.

I am a confirmed realist, but this talk will take the somewhat Buddhist view that materials are mere illusions. The only materials that are really forever are the elements of the periodic table. Everything else is just a collection of chemical bonds, a transient embodiment of chemical and mechanical assembly processes.

In nature, the waste of one organism becomes the food of another. Animal wastes become fertilizer for plants. Oxygen, a by-product of plant photosynthesis, allows animals to breathe. Everything is linked, and true waste is rare. By analogy, industrial ecology takes a systems approach to the materials life cycle, viewing it as a complex network of interconnected loops.

Taking this systems approach, we interviewed firms in the copper-based metals industry in New England. Every time a firm bought metal from a

supplier, sent metal to a scrap dealer, or threw metal out, we recorded that transaction. Then to show the connections between firms, we made what we call a spaghetti diagram, a very tangled diagram even though it ignores what happens outside the 35 or 40 firms we studied. We found that copper is used with more than 98 percent efficiency. Some goes to landfills, but most of it simply goes round and round the loops of spaghetti.

How can such an efficient industrial ecosystem work for other materials? For copper-based metals, we found that scrap dealers are the key. Their business is to collect junk, break it apart, and sell sorted metal. Their part of the spaghetti diagram works only because they can do this. To make a similar system work for other materials, two kinds of technology are needed: disassembly technology (to take products apart in selective ways) and what I call “negentropy” technology (to sort mixtures into bins of things people actually want).

Much of the technology discussed here seems to be making disassembly and sorting more difficult than they were before. New engineered materials tend to be chemically or mechanically complex. On the other hand, the same kind of technological thinking that created these materials should also be amenable to figuring out how to take them apart and sort them.

Leading firms with good environmental reputations have shifted their approach to the environment. Where once they focused on cost reduction and compliance with regulations, they now think strategically about redesigning products and how to sell them. A consequence is that many companies now try to sell consumer satisfaction, function, and service rather than “stuff.”

Materials are central to most of these strategies. For the materials scientist and engineer they imply the following challenges:

• reduce material intensity

• reduce energy intensity

• enhance material recyclability

• reduce dispersion of toxic substances

• maximize sustainable use of renewable resources

• extend product durability

Why is there an Office of Industrial Technology at the U.S. Department of Energy? Because the industrial sector accounts for more than one-third of U.S. energy consumption. Following the oil-price shocks in the 1970s, industrial energy efficiency improved by about 40 percent—20 percent through technology, and 20 percent because the mix of industries changed— but since the mid-1980s there has been little change. At the same time, environmental costs have been climbing as regulatory standards are

strengthened. Incremental changes will not be enough to keep our industries globally competitive.

The Industries of the Future program seeks to improve this picture through R&D. Its focus is on the most energy-intensive industries, namely the materials extraction and processing industries, such as steel, forest products, and chemicals. These industries are responsible for 80 percent of U.S. industry’s energy use and 90 percent of its waste production. Energy typically represents 15 to 40 percent of their production cost, and pollution and waste abatement typically represent another 10 to 25 percent. Yet R&D spending has been falling relative to sales in these industries, in part because of the many recent mergers.

The Industries of the Future process is based on road mapping. We work with each industry to develop a business-sense vision of the next 20 years, and based on that vision we develop a road map of technology R&D. Some of the resulting R&D projects are conducted by industry, and some by the Department of Energy. A key to the success of these road maps has been to start with a goal 20 years hence and work back from it, rather than start with a list of ideas for projects today. The program has had excellent success in getting its R&D results implemented in actual industrial practice.

In meetings like this, my hardest challenge is that people often say, “These are the old smokestack industries.” That impression is wrong. High technology is key to their survival, and materials science in particular will play an essential role.

For the panel discussion, Ms. Swink was replaced by Dr. Toni Maréchaux, also of the Office of Industrial Technologies of the Department of Energy. Dr. Maréchaux previously held positions at National Steel and the NASA Glenn Research Center and has since become director of the National Materials Advisory Board.

Q: Improved durability and reduced material intensity may mean a high up-front cost. An example of this is the use of stainless steel rather than carbon steel in steam generators.

Ehrenfeld: It’s not always clear which strategy is best. This does indeed complicate the dematerialization challenges I mentioned. Every answer has to be specific to an individual product.

Q: In energy and environmental issues, will we in the United States act on our own based on public policy considerations, or will we be driven to action by pressure from the rest of the world?

Pfahl: Other countries are important markets for most companies these days, so U.S. regulations are not the only driver for change. And even more important than any country’s regulations are the concerns of consumers, who often drive business decisions on the environment in advance of regulation or other public policy.

Maréchaux: The world is becoming an ever more global marketplace. If the United States doesn’t fit its public policies to this fact of life, some industries may be driven out of the country.

Frosch: We have changed from thinking that quality costs money to realizing that bad quality costs money. A similar change is under way in our thinking about reuse and recycling. Why pay for something, put labor and energy and capital into it, and then throw it away?

Pfahl: Environmental cost accounting is an important development here.

Ehrenfeld: Public policy action is still important, though, for companies that haven’t started to look at this yet.

Maréchaux: For example, the Industries of the Future program makes a point of funding projects on by-product utilization but not on waste treatment.

Q: What about the energy industry itself?

Maréchaux: To give just one example, there has been a lot of work on uses for fly ash, a by-product of burning coal.

Ehrenfeld: One can follow resources in the energy industry just as in any other. Coal is a material resource; greenhouse gases are a by-product. Energy is the same as any other case.

Frosch: Shifts in attitude may help. For example, instead of just burning a fuel to get thermal energy, think of it as a complex chemical feedstock. With some additional chemical processing, there may be interesting opportunities to turn that feedstock into energy and valuable chemical products at the same time.