Title: Abiotic resources: new impact assessment approaches in view of resource efficiency and resource criticality—55th Discussion Forum on Life Cycle Assessment, Zurich, Switzerland, April 11, 2014
Abstract: Natural abiotic resources (here referring primarily to metals, minerals and fossil resources) have become a growing political concern with increased focus on resource scarcity, natural availability and dependency on foreign supply. For a nearterm time horizon, both the USA and the EU have identified so-called critical raw materials including platinum group metals, rare earth elements, etc. (EC 2010; NRC 2008), and resource efficiency has become one key element of the sustainability policy of the EU and Switzerland (EC 2011a; Bundesrat 2012). Within the context of life cycle assessment (LCA), the development of life cycle impact assessment (LCIA) methods has been very diverse without a unifying practice for how to assess the depletion of abiotic resources from the natural environment (Carvalho et al. 2014; EC 2011b; Klinglmair et al. 2013; Mancini et al. 2013). The overarching goal of the 55th Discussion Forum on LCA (DF-55) was to present and discuss recent developments of novel and updated LCIA approaches with respect to the relevance of resources as a separate safeguard subject (or area of protection, AoP) in environmental assessment, the rationale and interpretations of their respective environmental mechanisms related to abiotic resource depletion and the relation to other resource-related concerns such as scarcity and criticality. Setting the stage for the discussion forum, the first presentation of the day was given by Stefanie Hellweg (ETH Zurich, Switzerland) who gave an overview of the various issues related to the assessment of abiotic resource depletion. The extraction rates and the number of resources put into use are increasing and products are becoming more complex. The resulting heterogeneity of materials and products poses great challenges for recycling and recovery of the resources. In this context, three different methodologies for addressing different issues or questions related to the management of resources were outlined: