Towards a sustainable use of primary boron. Approach to a sustainable use of primary resources

Abstract

The sustainable use of raw materials does not only concern the environmental impacts of their production and consumption, but also the intergenerational distribution of access to the raw material or the services provided by that material. From this sustainability perspective, current generations should not deprive future generations from economically accessible ores, but they have the responsibility to assure that a sufficient quantity of enriched deposits of primary materials continues to be available for future generations. Comparing the extraction rate of different primary materials to their current use, some materials are scarcer than others. Elements like aluminum, magnesium, titanium and vanadium are relatively abundant and cannot be considered critical from a geological point of view. From a point of view of availability for future generations, action is not really urgent for these elements. However, other elements, like antimony, rhenium, gold, zinc and molybdenum are relatively scarce from a geological perspective. The current extraction rate of these elements is not sustainable. Boron is also a relatively scarce element, comparing the current extraction rate to the geological availability. The accessible ores may be depleted within two hundred years. This may affect future generations negatively in securing services provided by boron. Therefore, we investigated whether the use of primary boron could be reduced to a sustainable level) without losing any of the services currently provided by boron. In this framework we have designed a generally applicable approach for investigating whether and to what extent a combination of substitution, material efficiency and recycling could reduce the use of a primary material to a sustainable level.