Transport – not just carbon hungry

IT IS GENERALLY ACCEPTED that transport-related activity accounts for between 25-30 percent of global CO2 emissions, and the sector is not yet significantly reducing that very material effect on global warming.

There is considerable data and research knowledge about the sector’s carbon footprint and contribution to climate change. This is normally related directly to its fossil fuel consumption.

Alongside this, transport is also indisputably a very significant consumer of other finite material resources on the planet, yet very few figures are available for this part of its impacts.

To properly understand the transport sector’s hunger for the Earth’s resources, a moment’s reflection will quickly identify the high level of materials it deploys. These include iron and steel, copper and aluminium; sand, cement and aggregates, plus hydrocarbon derivatives other than fuels – like bitumen and plastics – and organic compounds, including timber and rubber, not to mention the precious minerals used in automotive systems and increasingly in the digital technologies on which transport increasingly depends (e.g. silicon, lithium, cobalt and platinum).

A new book entitled, ‘Material World’ by Sky News economics editor, Ed Conway, engagingly reminds us that all these resources are finite, and though they have created the modern world we know, and have fed human ingenuity and greed for centuries, our appetite for them is now greater than ever before, and the battle for both their stewardship, control and deployment will determine our human future and that of the planet.

In fact, says Conway, we dug more resources out of the earth in 2017 than in all of human history before 1950. For every ton of fossil fuels, we actually extract six tons of other materials, much of it by mining, marine exploitation or deforestation, to use in construction, manufacturing and transport – including the increasing amount of electronic equipment that we depend upon to keep modern communications and processing running.

The fibre-optic cables that weave the World Wide Web, the copper veins of electric grids, the silicon chips and lithium batteries that power phones and cars: though it can feel like we now live in a weightless world of information – what Ed Conway calls “the ethereal world” – our twenty-first century lives are still very much rooted in the physical application of the Earth’s materials.

So should we not have real concerns at the implications for transport – amongst all the other sectors – of this voracious appetite underpinning our economic and social behaviour? And consider if there are alternative ways of approaching the inherent risks and impossibilities of continuing remorselessly on the current trajectory?

One approach being increasingly commended is the concept of the circular economy. This accepts that resources have to be recognised and managed in their totality – and that what we take out needs to be put back.

Experts and advocates like Circle Economy, the Dutch organisation, calculate that the global economy is now only 7.2% circular; and it’s getting less so year on year – driven by rising material extraction and use. The world economy meanwhile increasingly relies on materials from virgin sources. In the six years of publication of the Circularity Gap Report, the global economy extracted and used more than in the entire 20th century – improving people’s living standards certainly, but at the same time challenging the safe environmental limits of the planet.

The initial edition of the Circularity Gap Report in 2018 seems to have been the first of its kind to measure the level of current global circularity, finding it was 9.1%. It dropped to 8.6% in 2020 and has now fallen further – going down as the general rate of global material extraction rises. This is coupled with the fact that more and more materials are going into ‘sunk assets’ such as roads, buildings and durable goods, thus leaving fewer materials to cycle back into the economy. So a circular economy based on current resource exploitation alone cannot expect to keep up with our virgin material use rising to unprecedented heights – we cannot recycle our way out of this one.

With a circular economy it is estimated we could potentially fulfil most of current consumption needs with around 70% of the materials we currently use – something regarded as being probably within the safe limits of the planet. For the moment, we are not recognising them, however, with five of the nine key ‘Planetary Boundaries’ that measure environmental health across land, sea and air having been broken. Essentially, the Circularity Gap study finds that adopting a circular economy could not only reverse this overshoot, but also cut the global need for further material extraction by about one-third. This reduction is rooted in most urgently removing fossil fuels from the global equation to tackle climate change – and lowering demand for high volume minerals, such as sand and gravel, largely used for construction and infrastructure, including transport. Not to mention rare and precious metals.

The four key circular economy principles for resources are: Use less, Use longer, Use again and Make clean. Implementing them means a sharp decline in virgin material extraction, using the materials that we do have better and for longer, as well as swapping one-time fossil fuel uses for renewable energy, and toxic materials for regenerative ones, and boosting the use of secondary materials. It also means optimising how materials are used equitably for the wellbeing of both the current generation and future ones. This will involve both materials management and minimising consumption towards sufficiency levels. Key areas include energy consumption and carbon release, air and water pollution, un re-useable waste, eco-system degradation and habitat loss.

Implementing transformational circular solutions has been prioritised across four key systems – Food, the Built environment, Manufactured goods and consumables, and Mobility and transport. Done successfully, this could reverse the current overshoot of five of the nine key planetary boundaries, thereby maintaining sustainable ecosystems for water, land and air, and contributing to limiting of the global temperature rise to within 2-degrees.

As far as adoption of the circular economy approach is concerned, the EU Commission has indicated ambitions that by 2030 economic growth is decoupled from the extraction of non- renewable resources, and the depletion of the stock of renewable resources is reversed. And that by 2050 all economic activity is largely decoupled from resource extraction, through environmental design for a circular economy to eliminate waste and pollution, keep materials and products in use at their highest beneficial value, and to regenerate ecosystems.

This ambition builds on that of a reduction of the EU27 material footprint by 50% by 2030, and by 75% by 2050, and raising the circular use rate of all materials to increase the average to at least 25% by 2030.

To achieve this type of paradigm shift, however, a common language, clearly defined criteria and quantifiable metrics of the concept of circularity will need to be established to provide clarity on what defines the transition to a circular economy, and how it should be measured.

With a circular economy it is estimated we could potentially fulfil most of current consumption needs with around 70% of the materials we currently use – something regarded as being probably within the safe limits of the planet. For the moment, we are not recognising them, however, with five of the nine key ‘Planetary Boundaries’ that measure environmental health across land, sea and air having been broken.

An immediate related step would be to apply the ‘Do No Significant Harm (DNSH)’ criteria in relation to the transition, so things do not get worse whilst waiting for them to get better. But so far, use of the DNSH approach is either weak or non-existent for most economic activities, including, as is well documented, those of transport, and even that part of its footprint related to climate change.

To make a start, transport would need to not only restrain its use of new materials, but put in place measures that extensively reuse products and components, deploy secondary raw materials, and employ high-quality recycling. Alongside this, would be the principles of design for longevity and life extension through sharing, repair, refurbishment, remanufacturing and repurposing. Waste management is also fundamental to prioritising prevention and reuse of recycling over incineration and disposal. Meanwhile, habitat curation requires regeneration of nature by replenishing renewable resources and habitats at a rate that is at least as large as the depletion.

Even thinking about the above concepts illustrates how recognition of resource husbandry beyond just carbon consumption is likely to soon seriously impact the transport sector, as it would be core to the transition to a circular economy. This would create real challenges, not yet widely planned for in transport activities – but also new opportunities.

At a practical micro level, it is interesting to note that the concept of material resource depletion crops up in the just published report of the DfT’s Science Advisory Council on sourcing low carbon transport fuels, which we report in this issue. As well as addressing the obvious challenge of decarbonisation and the essential shift away from fossil fuels, this notes, for example, that hydrogen may be converted to electrical power in devices that themselves have significant finite material resource demands e.g. platinum or rare earth metals for fuel cells. Other fuels, such as Sustainable Aviation Fuel, may need expensive or supply-constrained catalysts for their production.

The paper points out, additionally, that rare or specialised metal resources required in many modern manufacturing processes also need consideration from a security of supply perspective, amid global instability and conflict rendering their acquisition vulnerable.

Though the panel does not specifically embrace the concept of circularity, it concludes that assessment of future fuel production and use should be assessed on a supply chain and life cycle basis to identify resource constraints, particularly for the case of battery production. It also raises the idea that, in the future, economically viable and readily recyclable carbon-based raw materials may themselves become a limited resource, making it necessary to consider where to best prioritise use of that carbon feedstock. Those soon competing for its deployment might include conversion to material products like plastics, fibre optics, carbon electrodes in batteries, as well as carbon-containing fuels.

We have – or perhaps more accurately, had, – become used to living in an age of plenty. No more so than in our creation and consumption of transport. As greater recognition of the finite nature and sustainability of available resources has started to sink in, initially in terms of fossil fuels, new concepts for assessing the realities of that situation have become necessary. Achieving net zero in carbon for transport is surely only the start.

Peter Stonham is the Editorial Director of TAPAS Network

This article was first published in LTT magazine, LTT871, 19 June 2023.