The idea behind this blog is to deepen my own, and possibly other's, understanding of sustainability and how it relates to the materials that surround us. This is quite a comprehensive subject as the idea of sustainability is complicated one, and involves many different viewpoints, and there are too many materials and composites out there to enumerate. Sustainability, at its most basic, asserts that the rate of growth or production of a material is greater than or equal to the rate of use or decline of that material. For example, forestry can be a sustainable production method if the rate of tree growth or plantings is greater than the rate of logging or cutting. If, however, new trees were not planted to make up for the removal of other trees, it would no longer be a sustainable system.
The way that this relates to the sustainability of materials themselves can be looked at in a variety of ways. In the forestry example, the trees are the material and the sustainability equation is quite simple. In some cases though, sustainable materials are those that can be taken from the land without causing irreparable harm to the surrounding ecology. Mining is an example of a production method in which a material can be labeled either sustainable or non-sustainable depending on whether the producers have taken into account the ecology of the land around them and the environmental impact of the process. A product can be deemed sustainable if it uses less materials than its predecessors tended to, whether the material is sustainable or not. What happens to the material after a product’s life cycle is complete can also affect its sustainability. The point here is that sustainability and sustainable materials have a host of definitions, and this blog is going to try to sort those out one material and one definition at a time.
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