ABSTRACT
The contemporary debate offers two perspectives on natural resources, especially regarding minerals and metals: one perspective looks at environmental pressures and scarcities; it often contrasts environmental constraints with extraction figures that have been on the rise since decades. Global consumption of material resources has almost doubled in absolute terms between 1980 and 2009. Environmental pressures can arise in each stage of material consumption, for example by emitting particulates during material production, erosions from mining and leakages of chemicals into the environment during the separation process of metals. The implications of a web of constraints undermining and obstructing efforts to increase resource efficiency implies differences across industries and countries, depending on the severity and inter linkages between such constraints. The balance between such expected demand increases and other goals however is not entirely clear, in particular as key terms are insufficiently defined and will leave space for quite different implementation pathways.
