Materials in a steady state world

Abstract

With the rise in public concern over the depletion of natural resources, the social role of the materials industry has come up for closer scrutiny. World models such as those being developed by Professor Forrester and his colleagues at M.I.T. leave little room for doubt that economic growth cannot continue far into the twenty-first century without enormous advances in the economical use and recycling of nonrenewable resources. Although studies of specific resource availability such as those carried out by Resources for the Future indicate no materials crisis before the year 2000, this optimistic picture is predicated on large and continuing advances in materials technology ranging all the way from geophysical exploratioh through the more economical use of materials in design. There is a serious question as to whether economic incentives to private industry will continue to be sufficient . to call forth the necessary rate and direction of technological innovation in the materials field to insure the necessary husbanding of the world’s resources. Wider governmental, and eventually multinational intervention in the allocation of scarce materials resources may become necessary to supplement the signals from the marketplace which may not act sufficiently far in advance. On the other hand, there is a growing realization in the underdeveloped world that they control the resources which the developed world needs to feed its industrial machine and can increasingly set their own prices. This may not be wholly bad in that it will tend to stimulate more innovation in the economical use of scarce materials and in the development of substitute materials. Furthermore in the long run it may provide a more acceptable way of transferring needed foreign exchange to the less-developed countries. The materials industry needs to face up more squarely to the future long-range challenge provided by the utilization of materials in a world in which material consumption simply cannot grow at anything like the rates of the recent past to which we have become accustomed.