Challenges for the Corrosion Science, Engineering, and Technology Community as a Consequence of Growing Demand and Consumption of Materials: A Sustainability Issue

Abstract

This perspective is intended to bring awareness to the corrosion community that the growing demand for engineering metallic materials required for our increasingly technological society is unsustainable. Current strategies important for materials science and especially the corrosion community are presented. First, the consumption of metals is reviewed, and the global supplies and demands of metals are discussed given different scenarios, including models of global societal development. It is pointed out that expected future consumption rates place pressure on the availability of specific elements used regularly throughout the world, with nearly every element in the periodic table now utilized in production of new technological devices. The consumption pushes the mining and production of metals to levels that should be counterbalanced with novel engineering and technological methods that incorporate strategies for metal sustainability. Standard approaches such as “make-use-dispose” must gradually be transformed into a circular economy paradigm embracing the “reduce-reuse-recycle” approach. Although recycling can bolster the engineered material supply, the growing demands require additional actions to significantly preserve natural resources and prolong metal sustainability. Our views on the abilities of the corrosion community to contribute to the concept of a circular sustainable economy are introduced. Maintenance strategies and corrosion management control may not be sufficient and need to be complemented with existing or emerging new technologies such as additive manufacturing, inverse engineering design, and solvometallurgy in combination with integrative design, modeling, and machine learning approaches. The corrosion community can impact the end-of-life of components and infrastructure at different levels, starting from mining through design, production, use, reuse, and recycling. Each process step is discussed, seeking possible solutions to preserve the metal resources by, for example, achieving more efficient and high-yield mining, designing and modeling new materials, increasing production efficiency, introducing light-weighting and smart materials, as well as developing more efficient recovery, recycling, and separation.