Materials and the Environment

Introduction: Material Dependence

Dr. Abdulkerim Gok

Gebze Technical University
Materials Science and Engineering
Introduction

https://www.ecogeneration.com.au/event-update-australian-energy-storage-conference-and-renewable-cities-australia-forum/
Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 2
Introduction

https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2020/11/02/renewable-energy-solutions-for-climate-safe-cities/

https://borgenproject.org/african-villages-fight-poverty/

Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 3
Introduction
This lecture is about materials: the environmental aspects of their production, their use, their disposal
at end of life, and ways to choose and design with them to minimize adverse influence.

Environmental harm caused by industrialization is not new.

The pea souper that killed 12,000: How the Great Smog choked London 60 years ago

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2243732/Pea-souper-killed-12-000-So-black-screen-cinemas-So-suffocatingly-lethal-ran-coffins-How-Great-Smog-choked-London-60-years-ago-week.html
Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 4
Introduction
Some aspects of industrialization have begun to influence the environment on a global scale: materials
are implicated in this climate change.

As responsible materials engineers and scientists, we should try to understand the nature of the problem (it is
not simple) and to explore what, constructively, we can do about it.

Advances in technology rely upon the materials. And we depend (or are addicted) on the materials.

• Addictions demand to be fed, and this demand, coupled with the continued growth of the human population,
consumes resources at an ever-increasing rate.

• This situation has not, in the past, limited growth; the earth’s resources are, after all, very great.

• But there is increasing awareness that limits do exist, that we are approaching some of them, and that
adapting to them will not be easy.

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The Materials Timeline
Materials have been considered of such importance that historians
and other scholars have named certain time periods after the
material which was predominantly utilized at that respective time.

They are the stone age, the copper–stone age (chalcolithic period), the
bronze age, and the iron age.

And now is the time for ……..

The steel age

The polymers age
The silicon (or semi-conductor) age
The nano-size age

And what it next?

Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 6
Climate Change
The Greenhouse Effect
• The Earth's temperature is a result of an equilibrium established between the incoming radiation from the sun
and the energy radiated into space by the Earth.

• A natural background level of 270 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere absorbs outgoing radiation, thereby keeping
this energy in the atmosphere and warming the Earth.

• CO2 absorbs strongly in the 13-19 µm wavelength band and water vapor absorbs strongly in the 4-7 µm
wavelength band. Most outgoing radiation (70%) escapes in the "window" between 7-13 µm.

• Human are increasingly releasing "anthropogenic gases" into the atmosphere, which absorb in the 7-
13 µm wavelength range, particularly CO2, CH4, O3, N2O and CFC's.

• These prevent the normal escape of energy and lead to a rise in terrestrial temperature.

• Present evidence suggests "effective" CO2 levels will double by 2030, causing global warming of 1~4°C.

• This would lead to changes in wind patterns and rainfall and as a result may cause the interior of continents
to dry out and cause the Earth's oceans to rise.

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Climate Change

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Materials and the Environment
The Reliance on Nonrenewable Materials
We don’t just “use” materials, we are totally dependent on them.

• Over time this dependence has progressively changed from a reliance on

renewable materials to one that relies on materials that consume resources
that cannot be replaced.

• As little as 300 years ago, human activity subsisted almost entirely on

renewables: stone, wood, leather, bone, natural fibers.

• The few nonrenewables, such as iron, copper, tin, zinc, etc., were used in
such small quantities that the resources from which they were drawn were,
for practical purposes, inexhaustible.

• Then, progressively, the nature of the dependence changed.

• Bit by bit nonrenewables displaced renewables until, by the end of the 20th
century, our dependence on them was, as already said, almost total.

Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 22
The Reliance on Nonrenewable Materials
Dependence is dangerous: It is a condition to be reckoned with.

• Take away something on which you depend — meaning that you can’t live without it — and see how difficult
life suddenly becomes.

Dependence exposes you to exploitation.

• While a resource is plentiful, market forces ensure that its price bears a relationship to the cost of its
extraction.

• BUT the resources from which many materials are drawn, oil among them, are localized in just a few
countries.

• While these compete for buyers, the price remains geared to the cost of production.

• BUT if demand exceeds supply or the producing nations reach arrangements to limit it, then there is your
problem.

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For Example…

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Materials and the Environment
All human activity has some impact on the environment in which we live.

• The environment has some capacity to cope with this impact so that a certain level of impact can be
absorbed without lasting damage.

• But it is clear that current human activities exceed this threshold with increasing frequency, diminishing the
quality of the world in which we now live and threatening the well-being of future generations.

• Part of this impact, at least, derives from the manufacture, use, and disposal of products, and products,
without exception, are made from materials.

The materials (and the energy needed to make and shape them) are drawn from natural resources: ore
bodies, mineral deposits, fossil hydrocarbons.

• The Earth’s resources are not infinite, but until recently, they have seemed so.

• The demands made on them by manufacture throughout the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries appeared
infinitesimal, the rate of new discoveries always outpacing the rate of consumption.

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Materials and the Environment
The realization that we may be approaching certain fundamental limits seems to have surfaced with
surprising suddenness, but warnings, that things can’t go on forever, are not new.

• Thomas Malthus, in 1798, foresaw the link between

population growth and resource depletion: “the power of
population is so superior to the power of the Earth to
produce subsistence for man that premature death must in
some shape or other visit the human race.”

• A group of scientists known as the Club of Rome, in 1972,

reported their modeling of the interaction of population
growth, resource depletion, and pollution: “if (current
trends) continue unchanged … humanity is destined to
reach the natural limits of development within the next 100
years.”

• The report generated both consternation and criticism,

largely on the grounds that the modeling was
oversimplified and did not allow for scientific and
technological advance.
Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972)
Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 26
Population Growth
The reasons that this roadblock has sprung up so suddenly are complex, but at bottom one stands out:
population growth.

• It looks like a simple exponential growth, but it is not.

• Exponential growth would have a constant doubling time — if

exponential, a population would double in size at fixed, equal
time intervals.

• For the first 1500 years, it was constant at about 750 years,
but after that, starting with the industrial revolution, the
doubling time halved, then halved again, then again.

• This behavior has been called explosive growth; it is harder to

predict and results in a more sudden change.

Malthus and the Club of Rome may have had the details wrong, but it seems they had the principle
right.

Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 27
Population Growth vs. Resource Depletion
Global resource depletion scales with the population and
with per-capita consumption.

• Per-capita consumption in developed countries is stabilizing,

but that in the emerging economies is growing more quickly.

• The first two, China and India, account for ~35% of the total,
and it is these two in which materials consumption is growing
most rapidly.

• Given all this, it makes sense to explore the ways in which

materials are used in design and how this might change as
environmental prerogatives become increasingly pressing.

https://www.statista.com/chart/18671/most-populous-nations-on-earth/
Gebze Technical University, Department of Materials Science & Engineering, Abdulkerim Gok © 2018, September 23, 2024, Slide 28
References
Almost all are taken from “Materials and the Environment Eco-Informed Material Choice”, Michael F.
Ashby, Elsevier, 2009

Some images are adapted from the web and links are provided at the bottom of the relevant slides.

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