ABSTRACT
The 2009 report on the growth in global materials used by Fridolin Krausmann and others deploys the image of metabolism to assess the efficiency with which materials, and energy, are used, and this metabolism of use they see as having increased eight-fold over the twentieth century. While the twentieth century is known for its unprecedented growth in population and the expansion of the global economy the twenty-first century is fast becoming characterized by the flourishing of a materials economy. This economy is being driven by a flood of engineered materials that are highly mobile, moving from institution to institution as they are adopted, transformed and manufactured into products to suit a number of distinct object functions. Global policy makers today have embraced the potential of cutting-edge scientific research that takes the societal benefit of newly-invented materials as axiomatic.
