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What leverage do we have at our disposal to achieve a more sober economy and sustainable development? One of the lessons that can be drawn from the previous chapters is that the existence of strong interactions between the various constraints affecting mineral resources prevents us from considering that we could free ourselves from them by resorting to univocal, purely technical, economic or societal solutions: proposing a simple solution to a complex problem is doomed to fail. In this volume, we examine what we can potentially expect from the deployment of several forms of leverage often evoked in the literature: domestic extraction, substitution, recycling, material efficiency (or decoupling) and low-tech solutions combined with sobriety.

To begin with, the maintenance or development of national or European domestic extraction is often mentioned both by certain geopolitical experts and by strategic committees, such as COMES (Comité pour les métaux stratégiques, Committee for Strategic Metals), concerned with reducing the impact of supply disruptions. This same recommendation is also sometimes made, this time in order to preserve the environment. However, although the stated objective is environmental, this leverage is rarely formulated by environmentalists themselves. We can think in particular of Guillaume Pitron’s latest work for the general public (2018) where the author calls for higher national production to avoid a delocalization of the ecological impacts of the energy and digital transition (in his chapter “The end of the last sanctuaries”). This leverage would be both an effective way to relocate negative mining externalities while reducing them significantly (thanks to more respectful local extraction conditions), and a great support to raise consumers’ awareness of the environmental cost of their lifestyle. The author even views it as a good way to increase consumer pressure on emerging countries to change their socially and environmentally disastrous extraction techniques. He criticizes environmental NGOs for not understanding the true impact of the energy transition:

Environmental NGOs are showing a certain inconsistency as they denounce the more sustainable effects of the new world that they themselves have called for. They do not admit that the energy and digital transition is also a transition from oil fields to rare metal deposits, and that the fight against global warming calls for a mining response that must be assumed. (Pitron 2018)

While the latter argument may appear to be valid in the case of an energy transition in the form of “green growth”, the argument for a national mining revival for the reasons cited above seems to suffer from at least four pitfalls:

– First, the revival of domestic mining supply suffers from multiple problems of perception by the population and stakeholders, as Johan Yans rightly points out (Chapter 4). However, the same author suggests ways to mitigate these negative perceptions;

– Second, it seems strange from an ethical point of view to expose individuals personally to a problem with the intention of raising their awareness. In the same way that we do not dump our garbage in the gardens and apartments of our fellow citizens to make them aware of sorting, it seems doubtful that we should expose them to the nuisances of mines in order to encourage them to reduce their consumption of mineral resources;

– Third, empirical statistical analyses show that countries with high domestic extraction do not consume fewer resources to support the way of life of their inhabitants – quite the contrary. The comparison of the United States and Japan presents a counter-example of lifestyle moderation through proximity to mines. If one follows the assertion described above, Japan, which has not been a major mining country since the late 19th century, should consume more material per capita than the United States, Canada or Australia, which are, on the contrary, major mining producers. However, the exact opposite is true. In 2015, Japan had a material footprint of 23 tons per capita compared to 30, 34 and 42 tons, respectively, for the three mining countries (UNEP 2016). It could be contested that these three mining countries are much less dense than Japan, which implies more consumption for the construction and maintenance of infrastructure. This is true, but does not the latter country better reflect the case of European countries? The facts are stubborn, because a study published by the PNAS (Wiedmann et al. 2015) shows, through a statistical analysis of 137 countries and controlling for land density, that the volume of mining per capita is positively correlated with the material footprint per capita and domestic consumption per capita. In other words, countries that extract more minerals and resources on their territory also consume more materials to sustain the lifestyles of their citizens (the study also shows this for the subset of metals);

– This naturally brings us to the fourth point. We must stop perceiving the energy transition as a supply problem that can only be solved by greater use of renewable energies (even if we do not disqualify the latter). With the exception of specific and local issues (such as chlorofluorocarbons for the hole in the ozone layer), supply-side policies alone have never succeeded in solving our global environmental problems (Dinda 2004), most of the time substituting one problem for another. It is also necessary to look at demand to cut off the pressure transfers downstream. Also, in the case of the upcoming energy transition, we must allow ourselves energy efficiency solutions and, above all, achieve greater sobriety.

One can also question the role of substitution as a natural market response to the tensions that affect mineral resource markets. Could it change the mineral resources landscape in the decades to come in a sustainable way? Intra-material substitution has always existed and will probably continue to be a predominant response to local or specific problems. Permanent magnets using rare earth metals have been replaced by copper wound rotors in a number of electric vehicle engines, following geopolitical conflicts over these materials produced almost exclusively in China. However, as Florian Fizaine shows (Chapter 5), this response by substitution depends not only on the technical possibilities, of course, but also on the scale of the implementation (inter-elements, inter-components, inter-system, etc.) to which are added multiple qualitative constraints of a cultural, legal, economic, physical, etc., nature. Even if this response through substitution existed and could be mobilized at a sufficient scale, the question of the implementation of “forced” substitution raises even more legitimate doubts.

It is one thing to note that substitution takes place under the effect of “natural” forces, it is quite another to trigger this mechanism through taxes and other tools at the disposal of the States. On the one hand, the objective to be achieved is sometimes totally missed or contributes to the emergence of another problem due to poor anticipation of the behavior of agents and the complex interplay of the economy. For example, Söderholm (2011) returns to the case of Sweden, a country that has taxed the extraction of gravel produced locally and intended for export (10% price increase). Initially, the measure was aimed at protecting the landscape and maintaining the availability of clean water, for which gravel reservoirs play a major role. This very indirect measure of reduction of primary extraction via the tax is theoretically quite risky as it can fail on different pitfalls or go through other channels: a weak reaction of demand to the price of the material, an increase in imports of the material (here untaxed), an increase in recycling, a substitution toward alternative untaxed materials such as crushed rock from demolition materials. In this particular example, the feedback shows that the tax has changed the behavior of the agents by pushing them more toward the substitution of crushed rock rather than toward other forms of leverage. There has been no reduction in the use of raw materials and no real increase in recycling. Moreover, crushed rock is more energy-intensive than primary gravel extraction and the production of concrete from crushed rock requires more cement, leading Söderholm to consider the policy questionable from an environmental point of view. If the aim was to reduce extraction, the economist would have advocated using regulation as operating licenses rather than economic tools such as taxes. On the other hand, mobilizing the leverage of substitution may also face social resistance. Creating an “artificial” unavailability of a resource can thus create discontent and lead to the withdrawal of the tools at its origin under social pressure (the carbon tax comes to mind). All these reasons lead us to believe that we will not profoundly modify the mineral resource landscape of our own free will via the mechanism of substitution.

In a more macroeconomic perspective, Thierry Lefèvre (Chapter 6) develops in his contribution the questions related to the possibility of decoupling GDP and natural resources. This question of decoupling is complex and today mobilizes a large number of researchers, particularly within the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP) International Resource Panel (IRP). The question of decoupling obviously refers to the tool of material efficiency, which aims to create more with less. By increasing the material productivity of our activities, we could gain in both ways: by continuing to increase GDP, while reducing our consumption of resources and the impacts left in its wake. This postulate of dematerializing the economy is an old one, notably through the concept of ephemeralization evoked by Philippe Bihouix (2019) in his latest book. We also come across it under the terms of decoupling, delinking or via the material Kuznets curve. But here again, the practical application shows poor results. Most of the time, decoupling is well below the scale effect of population and GDP per capita growth. On this point, the researcher’s contribution somewhat dashes our expectations by showing that the material footprint of most industrialized countries has grown over time.

Similarly, other studies conducted worldwide (Krausmann et al. 2017) also temper our expectations regardless of the raw materials studied. Thus, there seems to be no exception: economic growth always outweighs material productivity. Would it be enough to increase the speed of dematerialization in order to compensate for the increase in activity? Here again, the facts contradict this idea, particularly through the example of the increase in silicon productivity in the IT sector between 1970 and 2010, which, although without precedent (a factor of 10 million), has been associated with an increase in silicon consumption of a factor of 60 over the same period! Another study on sector productivity comes to the same conclusion (Dahmus 2014): sectors that have come closer (or have reached) absolute decoupling are not characterized by a high level of material productivity but rather by a low increase in their activity (scale effect). We should therefore once again either review our objectives or look at other leverage.

Another form of leverage is deemed as highly promising, that of recycling. Alain Geldron’s very comprehensive contribution (Chapter 7) on the subject of metal recycling appears enlightening from several points of view. First of all, far from the sometimes blissful optimism shown by the environmental press on urban mining and the circular economy, there is a wide gap between the discourse and the empirical facts: recycling rates are still far from circularity for base metals, and are even almost zero for minor metals. Indeed, there are several fundamental differences between the extractive metal economy and the metal recycling economy, which explain why we cannot switch from one to the other without major adjustments.

First of all, the returns to scale derived from the size of the stakeholders and the volume of deposits are quite different between the two activities, clearly contributing to the domination of the first over the second. Moreover, the share of the informal sector is still very significant in the recycling economy, whereas it remains very marginal in the extractive economy, at least when we look at the volumes supplied. Second, the qualities of the materials from primary and secondary deposits differ considerably (Fizaine 2020), again with a marked disadvantage for secondary activity (dispersed deposits, highly variable and fluctuating metal concentrations, metal complexity and diversity and coexistence with carbon chains). Finally, we find the opposition between stock management and flow management as a decisive dividing line between the old extractive economy and the new secondary economy, an opposition that is not without a reminder of the same antagonistic pattern that exists in energy production. However, it is legitimate to think that the management of a flow is more complex and less flexible than that of a stock, even more so when there is significant uncertainty about the former.

To sum up, recycling research is still marked by significant gray areas. As there is now a willingness to include recycling in a comprehensive circular economy policy, together with other tools such as the reduction of primary materials (efficiency) or their reuse, it seems that we cannot simply optimize recycling procedures independently of other circular economy measures (Berlingen 2020). In this case, there is indeed a strong chance of crowding out effects between measures. The outcry over the recycling deposit measure proposed by the Secretary of State to the Minister for the Ecological and Inclusive Transition in France, Brune Poirson, for plastic bottles is a good illustration of this. This measure is contested by local authorities, which would then be deprived of the collection and resale of this waste, for which they have already invested significant amounts in recycling infrastructures. According to the environmental associations, this project would also hamper environment preservation because the deposit for reuse is in this situation more efficient than the deposit for recycling.

Another illustration is the reduction of the precious metal content of electronic cards, for reasons of cost and efficiency, which has considerably reduced the attractiveness of recycling these cards, and also of all the minor metals that accompany them (Cui and Roven 2011; Adie et al. 2016). These two examples present possible incompatibilities between circular economy measures, which require careful study of the interaction effects when several measures are launched in parallel. We must also, in each situation, favor certain forms of leverage rather than generating their use across the entire circular economy.

Finally, we can see that sobriety is still the overlooked aspect of environmental policies. Often referred to in the reports of international organizations and in the wishes of companies to make their environmental balance sheet greener, moderation is not often put into practice and rarely deployed in the field or in implementing decrees. Philippe Bihouix’s contribution (Chapter 8) explores this possibility through a combination of objectives such as ecodesign (recyclability and product durability), “moderate use of machinery” in his terms, the resizing of activities and work on the desirability of change (highlighting the gains associated with change). Using numerous examples, he describes what could be an alternative to the search for green growth, which is confronted with complexity and often leads to rebound effects. Indeed, as we have seen in Volume 1 of this book, efficiency (providing the same economic service with less material/energy) rarely results in a decrease in consumption because this is in any case outweighed by the increase in the volume of activity. Renunciation and moderation could thus intervene where efficiency fails, by cutting off at source the primary cause of the exponential increase in the consumption of natural resources. Nevertheless, as is often forgotten, sobriety is not business-friendly and the stagnation (or even decline) in the volume of activity does not go without posing problems in terms of budget balance, debt sustainability and the financing of pension systems, notwithstanding its effects in terms of employment and unemployment. These are the questions that arise at the opening of Volume 2 of this book, which is devoted to the issues at stake and, above all, to the leverage that can provide a response to the various challenges that must be taken up in order to achieve the sustainable growth mentioned in Volume 1.