Against the background of technological innovation, a growing world population and life-style changes that have led to an increased use of raw materials, finding a way to deal with the finiteness of the world’s resources is one of the pressing issues of today. In the course of the last years, due to highly volatile resource prices and growing concerns about supply disruptions, non-fuel minerals have come more into the focus of researchers and practitioners alike. Due to their special material characteristics, critical metals are considered essential for several emerging technologies used for instance in low-carbon energy production, with their demand highly increasing. Finding ways to use these critical metals more sustainably seems highly imperative in that context.
We brought existing solution approaches together and set them into relation for the special case of indium, using an expert-based formative scenario analysis and structuring the results from a life-cycle’s perspective. The resulting four scenarios represent (i) an optimistic exploration of today’s trends and technological state-of-the-art, (ii) a system that focuses fully on the recycling phase, (iii) a system governed in all spheres by a strong state, and (iv) one with well-balanced power structures, where the state sets the side-rails but leaves some room for private economy initiatives. They helped to identify central criteria for the development of robust constellations of technological innovation and measures to govern and promote a more sustainable resource use.
The results showed that, while generally a balanced relationship of state and non-state measures contributes towards a more sustainable critical metal use, decision-makers are confronted with the need to prioritize and differentiate measures for each phase and critical metal specifically, and revealed the limits of possible action and hurdles for implementation, when considering different scales and metals, and varying time-frames of decision makers, technology marketability, and complex time-ecological aspects.