Daniel B Müller

• PhD, MSc
• Professor at Norwegian University of Science and Technology

Accelerating climate actions is critically urgent, but its progress hinges on the availability of materials. As production of materials for renewable energy infrastructure requires energy, there is an inherent feedback loop between energy and material systems. Transition models often ignore material supply constraints, yet as transition ambitions g...

Despite their relevance in building stock modeling, building lifetimes are poorly understood and tend to form the weakest link in forecasting energy use, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, waste generation, and resource use. Here, we develop a methodology to trace building lifetimes for cohorts in two central areas built up after fires in the 1840s. U...

The global energy transition relies increasingly on lithium-ion batteries for electric transportation and renewable energy integration. Given the highly concentrated supply chain of battery materials, importing regions have a strategic imperative to reduce their reliance on battery material imports through, e.g., battery recycling or reuse. We inve...

Global resource extraction raises concerns about environmental pressures and the security of mineral supply. Strategies to address these concerns depend on robust information on natural resource endowments, and on suitable methods to monitor and model their changes over time. However, current mineral resources and reserves reporting and accounting...

Most strategies for climate change mitigation rely on a fast decarbonisation of the transport sector based on electric vehicles (EVs) using lithium-ion batteries. There are concerns about lithium availability to enable this transition and it is unclear whether and how potential supply shortages could be mitigated through production and consumption...

Limiting climate heating while meeting basic needs for all necessitates large-scale deployment of renewable energy. Understanding the dynamics of mobilizing materials for the transition requires considering: 1) availability of resources in the environment and technosphere; 2) accessibility depending on resource quality and available technologies; 3...

Embodied emissions in construction materials make a relevant contribution to carbon emissions worldwide. While this has been broadly recognised, only little attention has been paid to the role of load-bearing structures in this regard, and if so, mainly limited to assessments of individual structures. For analysing the global warming impact of engi...

Frank Herbert’s Dune is one of the most famous works of science fiction, with 20 million copies sold and several movie adaptations. More importantly, it is considered as one of the first science-fiction novels with a strong ecological focus. Herbert used the ecosystem of the Oregon coastal dunes as a source of inspiration to design the desertic pla...

Limiting climate heating while meeting basic needs of all necessitates eliminating fossil carbon emissions. This paper discusses the dynamics of mobilizing materials required for large-scale deployment of renewable energy, which entail: 1) availability of resources in the environment and technosphere; 2) accessibility, which depends on resource qua...

The exponential increase in lithium-ion battery (LIB) demand for electric vehicles (EVs) has sparked material supply concerns, which makes the understanding of the LIB system and its drivers a pertinent issue. To understand the uncertainty and sensitivity around these drivers, we introduce the MATerIaL Demand and Availability (MATILDA) model. We in...

The demand for automotive aluminium is expected to boom in the coming decades given current trends in the passenger car market, such as electrification, light-weighting, customers’ preference for larger cars (SUVs) and growing global car ownership and population, resulting in a growing challenge for the aluminium sector to curb GHG emissions. We de...

Car transport is currently undergoing three simultaneous revolutions that are co-shaping the pathway to low-carbon mobility: fleet electrification, shared mobility, and autonomous cars (ACs). So far, studies of the climate impacts have mostly focused on the revolutions in isolation, neglecting potential synergies, and using methodologies that poorl...

Models that study the socio‐economic metabolism often apply a lifetime approach to capture the stock dynamics of products. The lifetime is usually obtained empirically from statistical information and is assumed to describe the dynamics of the product and its components. However, for new types of products for which historic outflow data is limited,...

Omega-3 EPA and DHA fatty acids are vital for human health, but current human nutritional requirements are greater than supply. This nutrient gap is poised to increase as demand increases and the abundance of aquatic foods and the amount of omega-3 they contain may dwindle due to climate change and overfishing. Identifying and mitigating loss and i...

Lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) will play a crucial role in achieving decarbonization and reducing greenhouse gases. If the EU wants to be competitive in the global market of LIBs, it has to ensure a sustainable and secure supply of the raw materials needed for the manufacturing of these batteries. Limited understanding of how the battery material cyc...

In recent years, increasing attention has been given to the potential supply risks of critical battery materials, such as cobalt, for electric mobility transitions. While battery technology and recycling advancement are two widely acknowledged strategies for addressing such supply risks, the extent to which they will relieve global and regional cob...

reenhouse gas (GHG) accounting in industrial plants usually has multiple purposes, including mandatory reporting, shareholder and stakeholder communication, developing key performance indicators (KPIs), or informing cost-effective mitigation options. Current carbon accounting systems, such as the one required by the European Union Emission Trading...

Retired passenger battery electric vehicles (BEVs) are expected to generate significant volumes of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), opening business opportunities for second life and recycling. In order to evaluate these, robust estimates of the future quantity and composition of LIBs are imperative. Here, we analyzed BEV fate in the Norwegian passeng...

Sand, gravel, and crushed rock, together referred to as construction aggregates, are the most extracted solid materials. Growing demand is damaging ecosystems, triggering social conflicts, and fueling concerns over sand scarcity. Balancing protection efforts and extraction to meet society's needs requires designing sustainable pathways at a system...

Sustainable development involves a responsible management of the interactions between humans and their built and natural environment. From a physical perspective, the interactions can be characterized as stocks and flows of energy and matter within and between these spheres. Understanding the dynamics of the stocks is essential to enable their resp...

The transition to a climate-neutrality is expected to boost the demand for batteries in the coming years. If the EU wants to be competitive in the global market of battery manufacturing it has to ensure a sustainable, secure supply of raw materials needed for the batteries value chain. Therefore, reliable systemic information on recent availability...

Car electronics form an extensive yet untapped source for secondary critical raw materials. To seize their recycling potentials it is imperative to understand how the number and volumes of car electric and electronic (EE) devices are affected by trends in: i) car typology, ii) penetration and integration of automobile electronic control systems (AE...

Long-chain omega-3 fatty acids—eicosapentaenoic and docosahexaenoic acids—are essential components of human diets and some aqua and animal feeds, but they are sourced from finite marine fisheries, and are in short supply and deficient in large parts of the world. We use quantitative systems analysis to model the current global eicosapentaenoic acid...

Until this day, data in industrial ecology (IE) have been commonly seen as existing within the domain of particular methods or models, such as input–output, life cycle assessment, urban metabolism, or material flow analysis data. This artificial division of data into methods contradicts the common phenomena described by those data: the objects and...

Car electronics form a large but poorly utilized source for secondary critical raw materials (CRMs). To capitalize on this potential, it is necessary to understand the mechanism in which car electronics enter and exit the vehicle fleet over time. We analyze the historical penetration of selected car electronic control systems (ECS) in 65,475 car mo...

Recent high-level agreements such as the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals aim at mitigating climate change, ecological degradation and biodiversity loss while pursuing social goals such as reducing hunger or poverty. Systemic approaches bridging natural and social sciences are required to support these agendas. The surging huma...

Changes in national and global food demand are commonly explained by population growth, dietary shifts, and food waste. Although nutrition sciences demonstrate that biophysical characteristics determine food requirements in individuals, and medical and demographic studies provide evidence for large shifts in height, weight, and age structure worldw...

Electric mobility is a key element in the transition to a more sustainable transport system. Already today Li-ion batteries (LIB) are used in many stationary and mobile applications. If electric vehicles (EV) based on LIB reach a strong market penetration the recycling of lithium from growing numbers of automotive batteries will be decisive for fut...

Increased nutrient cycling in the agri-food system is a way to achieve a healthier nutrient stewardship and more sustainable food production. In life cycle assessment (LCA) studies, use of recycled fertilizer products is often credited by the substitution method, which subtracts the environmental burdens associated with avoided production of minera...

A global aluminium flow modelling tool, comprising nine trade linked regions, namely China, Europe, Japan, Middle East, North America, Other Asia, Other Producing Countries, South America and Rest of World, has been developed. The purpose of the Microsoft Excel-based tool is the quantification of regional stocks and flows of rolled, extruded and ca...

Modern cities and societies are built fundamentally based on cement and concrete. The global cement production has risen sharply in the past decades due largely to urbanization and construction. Here we deployed a top-down dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) model to quantify the historical development of cement in-use stocks in residential, non-r...

** The full-text version of this article can be found on the Environmental Science & Technology website: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/acs.est.6b05743 ** One of the major applications of critical metals (CMs) is in electrical and electronic equipment (EEE), which is increasingly embedded in other products, notably passenger vehicles. However...

The plant-availability of phosphorus (P) plays a central role in the ability of secondary P resources to replace mineral fertilizer. This is because secondary P plant-availability varies, often with large fractions of residual P that has no immediate fertilization effect. Therefore, if low quality secondary P fertilizers are applied, they will accu...

Housing in developing countries is often inadequate due to overcrowding, lack of suitable shelter, lack of sanitation and exposure to natural hazards. The United Nations classifies these conditions into two types of deficit: quantitative and qualitative. Strategies for eliminating housing deficits need to consider the dynamics of the total dwelling...

Future availability of byproduct metals is not limited by geological stocks, but by the rate of primary production of their carrier metals, which in turn depends on the development of their in-use stocks, the product lifetimes, and the recycling rates. This linkage, while recognized conceptually in past studies, has not been adequately taken into a...

The built environment stocks such as buildings and infrastructures are key to human development: they provide the fundamental physical settings that the provision of basic human needs such as food, shelter, and transport rely on, but also contribute to anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions throughout their construction, operation, and end-of...

Phosphate rock is a non-renewable source of phosphorus (P) in mineral fertilizer and many countries need to use P fertilizer more efficiently in food production. This study explored the theoretical fertilizer potential of the P-rich bioresources animal manure and sewage sludge to supply the required P fertilizer for crops. We used Norway as a case...

Humanity faces three large challenges over the coming decades: urbanisation and industrialisation in developing countries at unprecedented levels; concurrently, we need to mitigate against dangerous climate change and we need to consider finite global boundaries regarding resource depletion. Responses to these challenges as well as models that info...

Recycling of aluminum is beneficial due to reduced energy inputs, greenhouse gas emissions and raw material costs. Beverage cans are currently the second largest source of old scrap, and could become even larger with improved collection. However, impurities such as iron, titanium or lead may impede end-of-life recycling at higher levels, especially...

The complexity of data and methods in industrial ecology (IE) keeps growing, and the demand for comprehensive and interdisciplinary assessments increases. To keep up with this development, the field needs a data infrastructure that allows researchers to annotate, store, retrieve, combine, and exchange data at low cost, without loss of information,...

Food waste (FW) generates large upstream and downstream emissions to the environment and unnecessarily consumes natural resources, potentially affecting future food security. The ecological impacts of FW can be addressed by the upstream strategies of FW prevention or by downstream strategies of FW recycling, including energy and nutrient recovery....

Future phosphorus (P) scarcity and eutrophication risks demonstrate the need for systems-wide P assessments. Despite the projected drastic increase in world-wide fish production, P studies have yet to include the aquaculture and fisheries sectors, thus eliminating the possibility of assessing their relative importance and identifying opportunities...

A detailed understanding of material stocks in use is essential for anticipating future scrap availability, identifying critical drivers for material use, and developing strategies for resource efficiency. Here, we present a bottom-up assessment of iron and steel stocks in use in urban and rural China for the years 2000 and 2010, including >250 sub...

A wide spectrum of accounting frameworks and models is available to describe socioeconomic metabolism (SEM). Despite the common system of study, a large variety of terms and representations of that system are used by different models. This makes it difficult for practitioners to compare and choose a model or model combination that is fit for purpos...

Gallium has been labeled as a critical metal due to rapidly growing consumption, importance for low-carbon technologies such as solid state lighting and photovoltaics, and being produced only as a by-product of other metals (mainly aluminum). The global system of primary production, manufacturing, use and recycling has not yet been described or qua...

Light-weighting of passenger cars using high-strength steel or aluminum is a common emissions mitigation strategy. We provide a first estimate of the global impact of light-weighting by material substitution on GHG emissions from passenger cars and the steel and aluminum industries until 2050. We develop a dynamic stock model of the global car flee...

Aluminum recycling currently occurs in a cascading fashion, where some alloys, used in a limited number of applications, absorb most of the end-of-life scrap. An expected increase in scrap supply in coming decades necessitates restructuring of the aluminum cycle to open up new recycling paths for alloys and avoid a potential scrap surplus. This pap...

Since their introduction in 1929, polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) have been used in a wide range of applications, mainly in industrialized countries. Although production of PCBs was largely banned in the 1970s, they are still present in various applications as well as in the environment where they remain a potential threat to animal and human heal...

Previous studies indicated that the availability of mixed shredded aluminum scrap from end-of-life vehicles (ELV) is likely to surpass the capacity of secondary castings to absorb this type of scrap, which could lead to a scrap surplus unless suitable interventions can be identified and implemented. However, there is a lack of studies analyzing pot...

Recycling of aluminum is beneficial due to reduced energy inputs, greenhouse gas emissions and raw material costs. Beverage cans are currently the second largest source of old scrap, and could become even larger with improved collection. However, impurities such as iron, titanium or lead may impede end-of-life recycling at higher levels, especially...

Identifying strategies for reconciling human development and climate change mitigation requires an adequate understanding of how infrastructures contribute to well-being and greenhouse gas emissions. While direct emissions from infrastructure use are well known, information about indirect emissions from their construction is highly fragmented. Here...

Material cycles have become increasingly coupled and interconnected in a globalizing era. While material flow analysis (MFA) has been widely used to characterize stocks and flows along technological life cycle within a specific geographical area, trade networks among individual cycles have remained largely unexplored. Here we developed a trade-link...

Networks for water and wastewater transport represent large capital assets and material stocks within cities. A better understanding of how their material content changes with population and size of the city may help to design networks with lower resource demand and lower construction and maintenance costs. We estimated the total length and mass fo...

Concerns for climate change and declining oil reserves lead to a shift of transportation systems in many industrial countries. However, alternative drive concepts contain to some extent critical raw materials. Since the availability of certain raw materials could be decisive for the success of emerging technologies, concerns are growing about the p...

A dynamic material flow model was developed to simulate the evolution of global aluminum stocks in geological reserve and anthropogenic reservoir from 1900 to 2010 on a country level. The contemporary global aluminum stock in use (0.6 Gt or 90 kg/capita) has reached about 10% of that in known bauxite reserves and represents an embodied energy amoun...

Steel production accounts for 25% of industrial carbon emissions. Long-term forecasts of steel demand and scrap supply are needed to develop strategies for how the steel industry could respond to industrialization and urbanization in the developing world while simultaneously reducing its environmental impact, and in particular, its carbon footprint...

Identifying strategies for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from steel production requires a comprehensive model of the sector but previous work has either failed to consider the whole supply chain or considered only a subset of possible abatement options. In this work, a global mass flow analysis is combined with process emissions intensities to...

Climate change mitigation;stock dynamics;recycling;socio-economic metabolism;material flow analysis (MFA)

Industrialization and urbanization in the developing world have boosted steel demand during the recent two decades. Reliable estimates on how much steel is required for high economic development are necessary to better understand the future challenges for employment, resource management, capacity planning, and climate change mitigation within the s...

Residential buildings account for about one‐third of the final energy demand in Norway. Many cost‐effective measures for reducing heat losses in buildings are known, and their implementation may make the building sector one of the largest contributors to climate change mitigation. To determine the sectoral emission reduction potential, we model a c...

Climate change mitigation in the materials sector faces a twin challenge: satisfying rapidly rising global demand for materials while significantly curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. Process efficiency improvement and recycling can contribute to reducing emissions per material output; however, long-term material demand and scrap availability for rec...

This article discusses the state of the practice, strength, and weakness of life cycle assessments (LCA) for achieving sustainability goals in the aluminum industry. Notable features of the reviewed LCAs include a limited geographical and life cycle scope and differentiated system boundaries, a common practice to use industry-wide inventory data, a...

Climate change mitigation in the materials sector faces a twin challenge: satisfying rapidly rising global demand for materials while significantly curbing greenhouse-gas emissions. Process efficiency improvement and recycling can contribute to reducing emissions per material output; however, long-term material demand and scrap availability for rec...

To reach required product qualities with lowest costs, aluminum postconsumer scrap is currently recycled using strategies of downgrading and dilution, due to difficulties in refining. These strategies depend on a continuous and fast growth of the bottom reservoir of the aluminum downgrading cascade, which is formed by secondary castings, mainly use...

The limited availability of energy and raw materials as well as the ambitious emission reduction targets are of big concern in the metallurgical industry as in other base materials industries. Consequently resource efficiency targets are set under EU's Raw Material Initiative, measures are taken to reduce GHG-emissions and there is a focus on carbo...

As the world's largest CO(2) emitter and steel producer, China has set the ambitious goal of establishing a circular economy which aims at reconciling economic development with environmental protection and sustainable resource use. This work applies dynamic material flow analysis to forecast production, recycling, and iron ore consumption in the Ch...

Global aluminum demand is anticipated to triple by 2050, by which time global greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are advised to be cut 50-85% to avoid catastrophic climate impacts. To explore mitigation strategies systematically, a dynamic material flow model was developed to simulate the stocks and flows of the U.S. aluminum cycle and analyze the corr...

The IPCC Forth Assessment Report postulates that global warming can be limited to 2 °C by deploying technologies that are currently available or expected to be commercialized in the coming decades. However, neither specific technological pathways nor internationally binding reduction targets for different sectors or countries have been established...

A dynamic material flow model was used to analyze the patterns of iron stocks in use for six industrialized countries. The contemporary iron stock in the remaining countries was estimated assuming that they follow a similar pattern of iron stock per economic activity. Iron stocks have reached a plateau of about 8-12 tons per capita in the United St...

Tin is an essential industrial metal with many applications from plastics to electronics. In contrast to other metals, tin reserves are very small with a static lifetime of 22 years. Mining is heavily concentrated in a few countries. Together, these characteristics render primary tin supply potentially vulnerable to short and long-term disruptions....

The rise of China to become world largest iron and steel producer and consumer since the late 1990s can be largely attributed to urbanization, with about 20% of China's steel output used by residential buildings, and about 50% for the construction sector as a whole. Previously, a dynamic material flow analysis (MFA) model was developed to analyze t...

The massive migration flows from rural to urban areas in China, combined with an expected decline in the total population over the next decades, leads to two important challenges for China's housing: the growth of its urban housing stock and the shrinkage of rural housing. The rural and urban housing systems in China were analyzed using a dynamic m...

This chapter focuses on metals as they provide the clearest example of the challenges and opportunities that mineral resources present to society, in terms of both primary production and recycling. Basic concepts, information requirements and sources of consumer and industrial resource demand are described as well as the destabilizing effects of vo...

While many countries have set ambitious targets for reducing energy use and GHG (greenhouse gas) emissions, it remains highly uncertain whether the policies introduced will be suitable to reach these targets at the specified times. Models used to inform building policies often do not account for the different boundary conditions related to socioeco...

Experts discuss the multiple components of sustainability, the constraints imposed by their linkages, and the necessity of taking a comprehensive view. Humanity faces immense hurdles as it struggles to define the path toward a sustainable future. The multiple components of sustainability, all of which demand attention, make understanding the very c...

The material and energy metabolism of the built environment stocks can be examined by use of a generic model framework that allows for a dynamic analysis where the stock's quantity, composition and quality are related to the demand for service provided to the population. The stock is classified by use of type-age matrices, according to what are the...

The activities of construction, renovation and demolition related to the dwelling (housing) stock have a strong impact on both material and energy demands. A deeper understanding of the dynamics driving these activities is a precondition for a more consistent way to address material and energy demands. The method presented herein is based on a dyna...

The anthropogenic nickel cycle for the year 2000 was analyzed using a material flow analysis at multiple levels: 52 countries, territories, or country groups, eight regions, and the planet. Special attention was given to the trade in nickel-containing products at different stages of the cycle. A new circular diagram highlights process connections,...