Christoph Helbig

• Doctor of Engineering
• Professor of Ecological Resource Technology at University of Bayreuth

This study reviews criticality, resilience, and raw material resilience literature. While we identify high conformity between vulnerability in criticality and performance degradation in resilience assessments, criticality additionally includes the likelihood of disruptions, and resilience emphasizes the required capacities to recover. The two conce...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings, and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end‐uses, usually not embedded i...

The introduction of the European Green Deal has triggered various legislative projects that will require product manufacturers inside and outside the European Union (EU) to ensure compliance with the new regulatory framework. As this is a complex task we present a methodology that manufacturers can use to derive a strategic focus for future product...

The global market for batteries is rapidly growing, leading to significant material requirements to build up an in-use stock of batteries for mobility and stationary applications. One strategy to secure the material supply for batteries and simultaneously reduce the life cycle environmental impacts of batteries is the implementation of a circular e...

Hydrogen is a key enabler of a carbon neutral economy. The main production route of renewable hydrogen is via renewable wind and solar power and water splitting via electrolyzers. Photoelectrochemical...

Material stocks of infrastructure, buildings and machinery are the biophysical basis of production and consumption. They are a crucial lever for resource efficiency and a sustainable circular economy. While material stock research has proliferated over the last years, most studies investigated specific materials or end-uses, usually not embedded in...

The Critical Raw Materials Act (CRMA) is an essential regulatory framework designed to address the pressing challenges faced by the European Union (EU) in the strategic sectors of decarbonization, digitalization, and aerospace and defense. It aims to tackle the lack of secure and sustainable access to critical raw materials (CRMs) by increasing ant...

Purpose The accessibility to most metals is crucial to modern societies. In order to move towards more sustainable use of metals, it is relevant to reduce losses along their anthropogenic cycle. To this end, quantifying dissipative flows of mineral resources and assessing their impacts in life cycle assessment (LCA) has been a challenge brought up...

The consumption of most metals continues to rise following ever-increasing population growth, affluence and technological development. Sustainability considerations urge greater resource efficiency and retention of metals in the economy. We model the fate of a yearly cohort of 61 extracted metals over time and identify where losses are expected to...

The term downcycling is often used anecdotally to describe imperfections in recycling. However, it is rarely defined. Here, we identify six meanings of the term downcycling as used in scientific articles and reports. These encompass the material quality of reprocessed materials, target applications, product value, alloying element losses, material...

This reprint of eight interesting articles from the Special Issue shows an insight in the field of assessing primary and secondary raw materials. First, an overview of indicator choice in raw material criticality assessments of metals is given. Case studies about Lithium-Ion-Batteries, LEDs and nickel-based Superalloys demonstrate criticality score...

Keeping materials in use for a long time is key to reducing primary material demand and environmental impacts of resource use. Recycling yields of metals should only be limited by thermodynamically unavoidable losses of the remelting processes for well-defined scraps. In practice, however, additional dissipative losses for metals occur due to incom...

Supply risk assessments are an integral part of raw material criticality assessments frequently used at the country or company level to identify raw materials of concern. However, the indicators used in supply risk assessments to estimate the likelihood of supply disruptions vary substantially. Here, we summarize and evaluate the use of supply risk...

The dissipation of metals leads to potential environmental impacts, usually evaluated for product systems with life cycle assessment. Dissipative flows of metals become inaccessible for future users, going against the common goal of a more circular economy. Therefore, they should be addressed in life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) in the area of pr...

Material resources each face different levels of risks in terms of supply disruption, vulnerability, and environmental and social impacts. Countries and companies apply criticality assessments to select or prioritize material resources requiring attention and measures to mitigate their associated supply risks. This Primer gives an overview of typic...

Concerns have risen in recent years about the accessibility of raw materials considered “critical” for technological advancements. The GeoPolRisk indicator was designed as a midpoint indicator in life cycle sustainability assessment to measure geopolitical supply risk with the aim to incorporate raw material criticality as a complement to environme...

Metals underpin essential functions in modern society, yet their production currently intensifies climate change. This paper develops global targets for metal flows, stocks, and use intensity in the global economy out to 2100. These targets are consistent with emissions pathways to achieve a 2 °C climate goal and cover six major metals (iron, alumi...

Nickel-based superalloys contain various elements which are added in order to make the alloys more resistant to thermal and mechanical stress and to the adverse operating environments in jet engines. In particular, higher combustion temperatures in the gas turbine are important, since they result in higher fuel efficiency and thus in lower CO2 emis...

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11367-020-01736-6 free view only version: https://rdcu.be/b1dDH Purpose The safeguard subject of the Area of Protection “natural Resources,” particularly regarding mineral resources, has long been debated. Consequently, a variety of life cycle impact assessment methods based on different concepts are ava...

PurposeAssessing impacts of abiotic resource use has been a topic of persistent debate among life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method developers and a source of confusion for life cycle assessment (LCA) practitioners considering the different interpretations of the safeguard subject for mineral resources and the resulting variety of LCIA methods...

Dissipative losses of metals are unrecoverable material flows representing the real consumption of metals. They occur during any process in the global metal cycle from primary production to waste management and have different receiving mediums. Avoiding dissipative losses can reduce both primary material requirements and potential negative environm...

The diversity of raw materials used in modern products, compounded by the risk of supply disruptions—due to uneven geological distribution of resources, along with socioeconomic factors like production concentration and political (in)stability of raw material producing countries—has drawn attention to the subject of raw material “criticality.” In t...

The EU directive on Waste Electrical and Electronic Equipment (WEEE) imposes the obligation to collect a large share of the end-of-life products on electronics manufacturers. Environmental aspects, however, are often considered only rudimentarily. Based on previous research and real-world data, a mixed-integer linear programming (MILP) model of a E...

Die vorliegende Arbeit bewertet die Nachhaltigkeit des globalen, technoökonomischen Umgangs der Menschheit mit Metallen. Eine solche Bewertung ist notwendig, da die Menschheit im Anthropozän den größten Einfluss auf die Materialflüsse von Metallen hat. Um einen nachhaltigen Umgang mit allen Metallen zu entwickeln, benötigen wir daher einen Überblic...

The diversity of commodities employed in modern products, compounded with the threat of supply shortages due to geological, geopolitical, and socioeconomic factors, has drawn attention recently to the subject of commodity supply risk assessment – often termed “criticality” assessment. But while criticality assessments have often been conducted on a...

Although waste prevention was promoted as the first priority for all EU member states in 2008, the actual implementation of activities has thus far been hesitant. Empirical evidence indicates that the reasons for this neglect include the limited measurability of waste prevention effects and the consequential lack of awareness, motivation, and incen...

Since manufacturers are the main drivers in the selection of the materials used in their products, they have a special responsibility for investigating the accompanying sustainability aspects. The recently increased attention they pay to these issues is motivated not only by a sense of social responsibility, but also by pressure from customers and...

One possibility for electrification of road transport consists of battery electric vehicles in combination with carbon-free sources of electricity. It is highly likely that lithium-ion batteries will provide the basis for this development. In the present paper, we use a recently developed, semi-quantitative assessment scheme to evaluate the relativ...

The diversity of materials employed in modern products and the complexity of globalized supply chains raise the importance of assessing supply risk of commodity inputs to product systems. Therefore, this article extends the Geopolitical Supply Risk methodology by proposing a characterization model to quantify product supply risk in relation to a fu...

Material and product life cycles are based on complex value chains of technology-specific elements. Resource strategy aspects of essential and strategic raw materials have a direct impact on applications of new functionalized materials or the development of novel products. Thus, an urgent challenge of modern materials science is to obtain informati...

Material and product life cycles are based on complex value chains of technology-specific elements. Resource strategy aspects of essential and strategic raw materials have a direct impact on applications of new functionalized materials or the development of novel products. Thus, an urgent challenge of modern materials science is to obtain informati...

As a result of the global warming potential of fossil fuels there has been a rapid growth in the installation of photovoltaic generating capacity in the last decade. While this market is dominated by crystalline silicon, thin-film photovoltaics are still expected to make a substantial contribution to global electricity supply in future, due both to...

Due to the material diversity of high-tech products and globalized supply chains, it is important to be able to assess geopolitical supply risks for the supply chain of any commodity. This article extends the Geopolitical Supply Risk assessment method under the Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment framework to account for multi-stage supply chains...

There is a growing concern over the security and sustainable supply of raw material amongbusinesses and governments of developed, material-intensive countries. This has led to thedevelopment of a systematic analysis of risk incorporated with raw materials usage, oftenreferred as criticality assessment. In principle, this concept is based on the mat...

Deutsche Bundesstiftung Umwelt, DBU-Projekt: Nr 30438. Augsburg. Endbericht.

Technology-oriented Small and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) face the problem of shortage of crucial resources, as functional components may contain up to 40 elements. Therefore, the assessment of alternative raw materials is of growing importance for the discipline of strategic product design and procurement processes as a topic of Information Sy...