Findings and recommendations

Findings and recommendations

Policy recommendations

•Increase data collection on material use and the life-cycle impact to set benchmarks and promote best practices.

•Improve consideration of the life-cycle impact in climate regulations to promote materialefficient choices at the design stage.

•Adopt policies that promote durability and long lifetimes to incentivise, for instance, refurbishing and repurposing of buildings instead of demolition.

•Set incentives to reuse and recycle to reduce the need for higher-emission primary materials production, and improve integration of supply chains to facilitate these strategies.

•Shift from prescriptive to performance-based design standards, so that efforts to use materials more efficiently are not unnecessarily restricted.

•Promote education and training programmes on material efficiency.

Historical demand trends for materials

Materials are the fundamental building blocks of society. They make up the buildings, infrastructure, equipment and goods that enable businesses to operate and people to carry out their daily activities. They enable services such as transport, shelter and mechanical labour, in many cases through the use of energy.

Global demand for key materials has grown considerably over past decades. Since 1971, global demand for steel has increased by three times, cement by nearly seven times, primary aluminium by nearly six times and plastics by over ten times. Material consumption growth has coincided with population and economic development. In the same period, global population doubled, while global gross domestic product (GDP) grew nearly fivefold.

Although materials bring benefits to society, they are also a source of environmental impact. Converting raw materials into materials for use results in substantial energy consumption and carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. Along with growth in material demand, energy and emission effects from materials production have grown substantially, by more than one and a half times over the last 25 years. Industry accounted for nearly 40% of total final energy consumption and nearly one-quarter of direct CO2 emissions in 2017.

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Notes: Outputs of different industrial sectors are displayed on an index basis referred to 1971 levels. Aluminium refers to primary aluminium production only. Steel refers to crude steel production. Plastics include a subset of the main thermoplastic resins.

Sources: Geyer, R., J.R. Jambeck and K.L. Law (2017), “Production, use and fate of all plastics ever made”, https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.1700782; worldsteel (2018), Steel Statistical Yearbook 2018, www.worldsteel.org/en/dam/jcr:e5a8eda5-4b46- 4892-856b-00908b5ab492/SSY_2018.pdf; IMF (2018), World Economic Outlook Database, www.imf.org/external/pubs/ft/weo/2018/01/weodata/index.aspx; USGS (2018a), 2016 Minerals Yearbook: Aluminium, https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/aluminum/myb1-2016-alumi.pdf; USGS (2018b), 2015 Minerals Yearbook: Cement, https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/cement/myb1-2015-cemen.pdf; USGS (2017), 2015 Minerals Yearbook: Nitrogen, https://minerals.usgs.gov/minerals/pubs/commodity/nitrogen/myb1-2015-nitro.pdf. Levi, P.G. and J.M. Cullen (2018), “Mapping global flows of chemicals: From fossil fuel feedstocks to chemical products”, https://doi.org/10.1021/acs.est.7b04573.

Demand for materials has grown considerably over past decades. Much of the growth since 2000 has been due to rapid development in the People’s Republic of China (“China”).

Figure 2. Global industry final energy consumption and direct CO2 emissions

Notes: Industry % of total is industry divided by industry plus non-industrial sectors (including buildings, transport, power generation and heat plants, agriculture, other energy uses and non-energy use). Total final energy consumption includes electricity consumption; direct CO2 emissions do not include indirect emissions from producing the electricity consumed. EJ = exajoules; GtCO2 = gigatonnes of carbon dioxide.

Industrial total final energy consumption and direct CO2 emissions have grown more than one and a half times over the last 25 years.

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Enabling strategies to move towards more sustainable material use

With expected population and economic growth over the coming decades, global demand for steel is expected to increase by approximately 30%, cement by 10% and aluminium by about 75% through to 2060 relative to 2017 levels. This is in the absence of significant changes in the way materials are consumed. The increasing material demand poses challenges for sustainability, including an increase of approximately 15% in CO2 emissions compared to 2017 levels. Therefore, material production and consumption need to be managed.

The Clean Technology Scenario considers substantial reductions in industrial CO2 emissions, which fall by about 45% by 2060 from the 2017 level. While not eliminating the need for strong efforts to reduce emissions intensity of material production, reducing the quantity of materials demanded can contribute to overall emissions reduction, thus reducing deployment needs for low-carbon industrial process technologies for the same CO2 emissions outcome.

Box 1. Scenarios discussed in this analysis

These scenarios should not be considered as predictions, but as analyses of the impact and tradeoffs of different technology choices and policy targets, thereby providing a quantitative approach to support decision-making in the energy sector.

The Reference Technology Scenario accounts for current country commitments to limit emissions and improve energy efficiency, including nationally determined contributions pledged under the Paris Agreement. By factoring in these commitments and recent trends, this scenario already represents a major shift from a historical “business as usual” approach with no meaningful climate policy response. However, global emissions increase by 8% by 2060 above the 2017 level, which is a pathway far from sufficient to achieve the objectives of the Paris Agreement.

The Clean Technology Scenario lays out an energy system pathway and a CO2 emissions trajectory in which CO2 emissions related to the energy sector are reduced by around three-quarters from today’s levels by 2060. Among the decarbonisation scenarios projecting a median temperature rise in 2100 of around 1.7-1.8 degrees Celsius in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change database, the trajectory of energyand process-related CO2 emissions of the Clean Technology Scenario is one of the most ambitious in the medium term and remains well within the range of these scenarios through to 2060. The Clean Technology Scenario is the central climate mitigation scenario used in this analysis. It represents a highly ambitious and challenging transformation of the global energy sector that relies on a substantially strengthened response compared with today’s efforts. It opens the possibility of the pursuit of ambitious global temperature goals, depending on action taken outside the energy sector and the pace of further emissions reduction after 2060.

A Material Efficiency variant illustrates the outcome of pursuing material efficiency strategies to their practical yet achievable limits in key value chains, while achieving the same CO2 emissions outcome as the Clean Technology Scenario. Strategies pushed considerably further in the variant are those more challenging to adopt from the perspective of requiring greater regulatory efforts, stakeholder co-ordination, value chain integration, investment, training,

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shifts in business practices or behavioural change. While highly ambitious on material efficiency, the variant remains within real-world technical, political and behavioural constraints.

Different material efficiency strategies can be applied at each stage of supply value chains, including strategies that reduce material demand, those that increase demand for some materials while enabling outweighing CO2 emissions benefits at other stages of the value chain, and those that shift to using lower-emission materials or lower-emission production routes. Some material efficiency strategies interact with each other, leading to synergies in some cases and limitations in others. Key examples of strategies at various stages include the following:

Design stage – lightweighting and optimisation strategies may enable using fewer materials to provide the same service; designing for long life could result in higher initial material demand but enable outweighing life-cycle emissions savings.

Fabrication stage – waste and overuse can be reduced when manufacturing materials, during production and in construction; higher-emissions materials can be substituted by lower-emissions materials.

Use stage – more intensive use and extending product or buildings lifetimes through repair and refurbishment can reduce the need for materials to produce new products.

End of life – reuse can reduce new materials needs; recycling can enable lower-emission secondary production routes.

Figure 3. Material efficiency strategies across the value chain

Numerous material efficiency strategies can be applied in the design, fabrication, use and end-of-life stages.

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