Elemental Accounting

All matter, and hence all life, is ultimately linked to the elements that constitute the periodic table. While scientists may disagree about its structure, there is no escaping the fundamental dependence we have on the material code of elements. Energy transforms the elements into compounds and is often the limiting factor in allowing us to cycle materials through our industrial metabolism. As resources become scarce, society will have to keep track of our elements, particularly metals, in more systematic ways. The term “nonrenewable” is often used to describe metallic resources. However, the elements (including all metals) are in fact indefinitely renewable at a fundamental chemical level. Only nuclear reactions can transform one element into another, and those are not so easy to come by!

The problem is that we have poorly designed products which lock up precious elements in forms that take a lot of energy to retrieve. Extricating the elements from consumer products will be necessary as mined resources become increasingly scarce. Recycling is already big business but is often undertaken as an afterthought in product design, and is also too dependent on individual behavior for efficacy. We need to track the elements that go into a product and the energy required to retrieve them as a metric in product design across most consumer goods.

The benefits of such a tracking system would go far beyond recycling because we would be able to budget our resource expenditure just as we balance our monetary accounts. Companies and governments alike could benefit from such “elemental accounting.” Knowing what material and energy is going in and what is needed to retrieve the material can help companies look for new business opportunities for the retrieved material while helping regulators keep track of pollutants and enforce quality standards.

The interdisciplinary field of industrial ecology is providing us with tools such as life-cycle analysis to streamline elemental accounting. Graduate programs that incorporate this field are beginning to take root in prominent institutions such as Yale. The International Standards Organization has also developed a basic framework for such analysis, and we now have the computational power to manage the large amounts of data that would be required to go global with this effort.

Many of us know what is inside our cereal boxes and other food items thanks to labeling guidelines, but how many of us know what elements are inside our computers or our clothes? In the coming decade consumers, regulators, and businesses must become much more “elementally aware,” so that decisions on making, breaking, and remaking products can be more prudently budgeted.