Sustainable Materials Management Basics
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What is Sustainable Materials Management?
Sustainable materials management (SMM) is a systematic approach to using and reusing materials more productively over their entire life cycles. It represents a change in how our society thinks about the use of natural resources and environmental protection. By examining how materials are used throughout their life cycle, an SMM approach seeks to:
- Use materials in the most productive way with an emphasis on using less.
- Reduce toxic chemicals and environmental impacts throughout the material life cycle.
- Assure we have sufficient resources to meet today’s needs and those of the future.
How our society uses materials is fundamental to our economic and environmental future. Global competition for finite resources will intensify as world population and economies grow. More productive and less impactful use of materials helps our society remain economically competitive, contributes to our prosperity and protects the environment in a resource-constrained future.
U.S. and global consumption of materials increased rapidly during the last century. This increasing consumption has impacts on the environment, including habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, overly stressed fisheries and desertification. U.S. food loss and waste alone “wastes” 140 million acres of agricultural land, 5.9 trillion gallons of blue water, 778 million pounds of pesticides, 14 billion pounds of fertilizer, and 664 billion kWh of energy. Finding more productive and sustainable ways to extract, use and manage materials, and changing the relationship between material consumption and growth, can help our economy and society.
Sustainable Material Management’s Life-cycle Perspective
By looking at a product's entire life cycle—from materials extraction to end-of-life management—we can find new opportunities to reduce environmental impacts, conserve resources, and reduce costs. For example, a product may be re-designed so it is manufactured using different, fewer, less toxic and more durable materials. It is designed so that at the end of its useful life it can be readily disassembled. The product’s manufacturer maintains a relationship with its customers to ensure best use of the product, its maintenance and return at end-of-life. This helps the manufacturer identify changing needs of their customers, create customer loyalty, and reduce material supply risk. Further, the manufacturer has a similar relationship with its suppliers, which helps the manufacturer respond more quickly to changing demands, including reducing environmental impacts along the supply chain.