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Material Flow Analysis from Origin to Evolution
The paper I'll discuss in this post is this one: Material Flow Analysis from Origin to Evolution (Thomas E. Graedel, Environ. Sci. Technol. 2019, 53, 21, 12188-12196).
The author is a pioneer in the field of "Industrial Ecology." His biography, included in the paper, bears repeating:
Professor Graedel joined Yale University in 1997 after 27 years at AT&T Bell Laboratories and is currently Professor Emeritus of Industrial Ecology at Yale. One of the founders of the field of industrial ecology, he coauthored the first textbook in that specialty and has lectured widely on industrial ecology’s implementation and implications. His characterizations of the cycles of industrially used metals have explored aspects of resource availability, potential environmental impacts, opportunities for recycling and reuse, materials criticality, and resources policy. He was the inaugural President of the International Society for Industrial Ecology from 2002-2004 and winner of the 2007 ISIE Society Prize for excellence in industrial ecology research. He has served three terms on the United Nations International Resource Panel, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering in 2002.
Here's his picture:
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He looks like a nice guy. Looks can be deceiving, but I'd expect given his focus on humanity, that he is a nice guy, and were he a creep, he would still be important to humanity.
Any effort to address environmental issues on a planetary scale, most notably but not limited to climate change, that does not consider this topic, industrial ecology, is bereft of any intellectual respectability and represents pure garbage thinking.
Period.
Here is a picture of a 55 square mile (144 sq. km) wind farm, Walney Extension wind farm, off the coast of England:
Here is a blurb about this wind farm from National Public Radio:
Standing in the Irish Sea, the turbines make up the new Walney Extension, a project led by Danish energy company Orsted. It officially went into service on Thursday, producing 659 megawatts of power — topping the 600 megawatts of a standard coal plant, according to the Union of Concerned Scientists.
A 55-Square-Mile Wind Farm Is Now Operating Off England's Shore
This statement is effectively meaningless, since as is typical of the Trump scale lies associated with destroying the future with unwarranted faith in so called "Renewable Energy," it confuses energy and power. It does not matter how much power this 55 square mile monstrosity produces when the wind is blowing. What matters is for how long and when the wind blows. The full description by NPR also includes the misleading and frankly stupid unit of energy that appears in the media, the unit "homes."
Each of its 87 turbines stands more than twice as tall as the entire Statue of Liberty. Together, they generate enough electricity to power nearly 600,000 homes, in what's being called the largest offshore wind farm in the world, off the coast of northwestern England.
This sentence - regrettably it rears its head in all kinds of news stories about so called "renewable energy" - shows that you cannot get a job as a journalist if you have passed a college level science course.
Here is a picture of the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant in San Luis Obispo in California, California's last operating nuclear plant:
Each of the twin reactors on the site is capable of producing 1100 MWe of electricity. In 2018, the two reactors combined, in two small buildings, produced, according to the California Energy Commission's Website, in units of energy, GWh (93.0 PetaJoules) of energy. This represented 9.38% of California's in state electricity production, produced in two small buildings. Thus the average continuous power, which is a unit of energy divided by the number of seconds in a year, was 2084 MW, meaning that the power from the plant, it's capacity utilization, was available 94.7% of the time, irrespective of whether the wind was blowing, the sun was shining, whether their was run-off from the Sierra Nevada mountain snow melts.
We do not know for how long and when the wind is blowing over the Walney Extension wind farm, and how often it produces 659 "Megawatts" of power, but if it did so 100% - it hasn't; it doesn't; it won't; - the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant produces, again in two buildings, 316% as much enegy as the Walney Extension wind farm produces in 55 square miles, 142 square km.
The Diablo Canyon Nuclear plant, is due to be closed by appeals to fear and ignorance, a result that will kill people, since nuclear power saves lives. Some of the people who will be killed will probably result from fires, since California is now laced with an extensive array of high voltage power lines designed to service it's so called "renewable energy" infrastructure, and, since wind power can do nothing to address climate change, and since it takes a lot of money to maintain power lines, and - the point of this discussion of industrial ecology - a lot of copper, aluminum and steel, as well as petroleum to fuel trucks, and chemicals to make herbicides - a lot of materials to do so.
Both reactors came on line in 1985, built using technology developed in the 1960's and 1970's, after huge protests involves appeals to ignorance in a state where huge numbers of people die from air pollution, and both will shut in 2024, again, killing people. They will not close because they will be inoperable. They will close because of appeals to ignorance.
Anyway.
Based on data from the Danish Energy Agency's master database of wind turbines, and my most recent analysis of it, which I last completed on May 13, 2018, according to my files, the average lifetime of a wind turbine is 17.77 years. 17 years and 283 days. (At the time of that analysis, the 2017 average continuous power of all the wind turbines in Denmark was 1907 MW, again less than the two buildings in the Diablo Canyon Nuclear Plant.) This lifetime data - the Walney Extension wind turbines are of Danish manufacture - suggests that in 20 years or less, the average wind turbine in the Walney Extension will be a rotting hulk, needing to be hauled away for dumping, recycling, or else rotting at Sea.
By the way, it takes huge amounts of energy to recycle huge amounts of materials.
This brings me to the paper, which is a summary paper with some nice illustrative graphics.
From Dr. Graedel introductory paragraphs:
Modern society housing, food, transport, medicine, and so forth is built on the back of materials. Until about 20 years ago, however, little quantitative information was available concerning rates of material use, material loss to the environment, efficiency of recycling, and other parameters of interest. Material flow analysis (MFA) has evolved to provide such information.
Material flow analysis is one of the central methodologies of industrial ecology. It is through MFA that an “industrial metabolism” (the flows of resources into and from a particular entity of human society) can be mapped and quantified, much as an accountant determines and quantifies monetary deposits and withdrawals. Dynamic MFAs (those that treat a specific region or system over time) go further; they permit a determination of the in-use and “hibernating” stocks of materials in an industry or society (the material version of the accountant’s “assets and liabilities”).
Unlike the accountant, however, who deals only with stocks and flows generally well-reported in monetary terms, the MFA analyst faces a wide diversity of commodities biomass, polymers, metals, minerals whose transactions often deal with inadequately described categories (e.g., “iron and aluminum alloys”), lumped categories (e.g., “plastics”), or resource flows that are seldom or never measured (many of the discard flows). MFA-related information quality may vary, from data to rough estimates to conjecture. The MFA analyst also needs to address flows that are of little import to the accountant because they are not monetized, such as waste flows not captured or emissions to the environment. The MFA specialist must therefore be part detective, part archivist, part extractor of information from experts, and part bold estimator, in order to build the internally consistent database needed to
achieve a useful material flow analysis.
In principle, MFA approaches can be applied to any material or combination of materials. In practice, metal stocks and flows have thus far proven to be the most suitable for analysis, largely because they can often be relatively easily tracked, and because data are commonly available for at least some parts of their life cycles. However, MFAs can also treat groups of materials, such as construction minerals (sand, crushed stone, cement) or summed material flows into and from a country or region.
Material flow analysis is one of the central methodologies of industrial ecology. It is through MFA that an “industrial metabolism” (the flows of resources into and from a particular entity of human society) can be mapped and quantified, much as an accountant determines and quantifies monetary deposits and withdrawals. Dynamic MFAs (those that treat a specific region or system over time) go further; they permit a determination of the in-use and “hibernating” stocks of materials in an industry or society (the material version of the accountant’s “assets and liabilities”).
Unlike the accountant, however, who deals only with stocks and flows generally well-reported in monetary terms, the MFA analyst faces a wide diversity of commodities biomass, polymers, metals, minerals whose transactions often deal with inadequately described categories (e.g., “iron and aluminum alloys”), lumped categories (e.g., “plastics”), or resource flows that are seldom or never measured (many of the discard flows). MFA-related information quality may vary, from data to rough estimates to conjecture. The MFA analyst also needs to address flows that are of little import to the accountant because they are not monetized, such as waste flows not captured or emissions to the environment. The MFA specialist must therefore be part detective, part archivist, part extractor of information from experts, and part bold estimator, in order to build the internally consistent database needed to
achieve a useful material flow analysis.
In principle, MFA approaches can be applied to any material or combination of materials. In practice, metal stocks and flows have thus far proven to be the most suitable for analysis, largely because they can often be relatively easily tracked, and because data are commonly available for at least some parts of their life cycles. However, MFAs can also treat groups of materials, such as construction minerals (sand, crushed stone, cement) or summed material flows into and from a country or region.
Dr. Graedel proceeds to give a nice overall background of his discipline, covering it's strengths, limitations, and techniques of the materials scientists working with it.
Another excerpt:
A list of attributes necessary to the designation of a MFA could well include the following;
i An MFA is the study of a clearly designed material flow system, not merely the study of a particular material flow.
ii An MFA includes a detailed description of each flow in the system (e.g., the physical and chemical state of each material), regardless of whether the flows are physical or monetary.
iii An MFA quantifies all flows of significance in the system. Conservation of mass constraints apply at each of the system nodes.
iv The presentation of MFA results is generally diagrammatic as well as numeric.
v An MFA analysis includes a discussion (or, better yet, a detailed analysis) of the reliability of the results.
An example of a typical well-characterized material flow system is shown in Figure 1: a regional-level cycle of copper. In this diagram the material flow from ore in the mine begins at the left and proceeds through ore processing, metal preparation, employment in product manufacture, use, eventual discard, either loss to landfill or recycling into the scrap market, and back into use. Because what is pictured in Figure 1 is for a specified geographical area (not global), import and export flows are included.
Figure 1:
The caption:
Figure 1. Regional level flows of copper (Europe, 1994).(1) The units are Gigagrams (thousand metric tons)
.
The caption:
Figure 2. 2010 Zn cycle for Asia.(44) The line widths are proportional to the magnitudes of the zinc flows from one node of the diagram to the next. The colors indicate flows of zinc during ore processing (yellow), fabrication (blue), manufacturing (tan), and discard, recycling, and loss (green). Min = mining, S = smelting, F = fabrication, Mfg = manufacturing, U = use, W = waste management. The units are Gg/a.
The caption:
Figure 3. Saturation of per capita iron stocks, as revealed by country-level MFA analyses.(45)
The caption:
Figure 4. Earth’s biogeochemical copper cycle, ca. 1994. Arrows indicate flows to and from reservoirs that are not in a state of mass balance, and are either accumulating or losing copper.(46)
The caption:
Figure 5. An example of a Sankey diagram resulting from a material flow analysis (this for iron on a global basis).(66) In this diagram, the line width indicates the flow magnitude, while the color indicates the level of uncertainty in the flow.
Excerpts on classes of materials:
4.1.1. Metals and Metalloids. As the protocols and approaches of MFA became reasonably well-structured in the early part of the 21st century, the applications were largely to three metals: iron, aluminum, and copper. In the past two decades a large number of other elements have been studied by MFA approaches - in a 2012 review,7 more than 350 MFA papers were listed, addressing 59 different elements. Work over the past several years has deepened that level of information for major element cycles, as well as adding a few other elements to the list. (In Supporting Information Table SI-1, notable MFA papers that have appeared within the past halfdozen years are cited.) Coverage remains incomplete, however: there are no published cycles for scandium, ruthenium, osmium, thorium, and most of the heavy rare earths...
...4.1.4. Construction Minerals. Most modern construction employs minerals: cement, crushed stone, sand, and ornamental stone such as marble. The amounts used are very large−larger even than food or fossil fuels.28 Most of these materials have low value and are mined and used locally, which tend to limit the availability of data. Unlike other minerals, however, data for cement seem well enough established to enable cement MFA analyses to be generated.29,30 In fact, estimates of the annual production of concrete are generally produced by utilizing cement data in combination with average ratios of cement to crushed stone and sand.
Two decades ago, some national material cycles6 attempted to quantify the flow of materials such as soil and rock that was mobilized by farm tilling and road building. The quantities proved difficult to quantify, however, and their usefulness was uncertain, so the effort has not been expended in recent years...
...4.1.4. Construction Minerals. Most modern construction employs minerals: cement, crushed stone, sand, and ornamental stone such as marble. The amounts used are very large−larger even than food or fossil fuels.28 Most of these materials have low value and are mined and used locally, which tend to limit the availability of data. Unlike other minerals, however, data for cement seem well enough established to enable cement MFA analyses to be generated.29,30 In fact, estimates of the annual production of concrete are generally produced by utilizing cement data in combination with average ratios of cement to crushed stone and sand.
Two decades ago, some national material cycles6 attempted to quantify the flow of materials such as soil and rock that was mobilized by farm tilling and road building. The quantities proved difficult to quantify, however, and their usefulness was uncertain, so the effort has not been expended in recent years...
The paper is regrettably not open sourced, but an interested party who really cares about the environment and the future is encouraged to travel to a good library to access it. If one is not interested in the environment and the future, one can always cruise to websites about how great solar and wind and Tesla electric cars are, or simply watch television.
OK (fellow) Boomer?
History will not forgive us, nor should it.
I trust you'll have a pleasant Sunday. I know I will. This evening I get to pick up my son, the developing Materials Scientist, from the airport, and chat with him about, um, materials science.
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