Many technologies in the materials, manufacturing, energy, and water sectors that currently provide important benefits to humanity cannot continue indefinitely and must be directed toward a more sustainable path. In this article, we introduce the concept of sustainable development, discuss the critical roles that materials science plays in this field, and summarize the contents of the articles in this special issue of MRS Bulletin.

Perhaps the greatest challenge of the 21st century is to sustain the developmental needs of the world. The economic growth that occurred in developing countries over the past two decades is unprecedented. Materials science and engineering (MSE) innovations will continue to have a pivotal role as an enabling resource to address sustainable development needs. This article focuses on the opportunities for MSE in five key thematic areas: energy, transportation, housing, materials resources, and health.

Materials scientists today employ essentially the entire periodic table in creating modern technology. In an age of sharply increasing usage, it is reasonable to wonder about the supplies of these elemental building blocks. In this article, we review current and prospective supply and demand for a variety of metals. Although data are often sparse, available information suggests that current practices are likely to lead to scarcity for some metals in the not-too-distant future. We conclude by discussing policies that, if adopted, might defuse some of these concerns.

Everyone has heard the slogan “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle”—but does observing this hierarchy really minimize negative impacts? With respect to reduction, it seems clear that using less of something decreases the impact. Similarly, reuse of a material or product should decrease the impact of each use, as long as the resources needed to restore the item to usable condition each time are not too large. For recycling, the picture varies by material and often involves tradeoffs among impacts. Life-cycle analysis aims to comprehensively compare all of the impacts of various disposition options. This article summarizes the pros and cons of recycling materials used in paper, drink containers, and the complex batteries for electric vehicles from the perspective of life-cycle analysis.

Ensuring the continued availability of materials for manufactured products requires comprehensive systems to recapture resources from end-of-life and wastewater products. To design such systems, it is critical to account for the complexities of extracting desired materials from multicomponent products and waste streams. Toward that end, we have constructed dynamic simulation–optimization models that accurately describe the recovery of materials and energy from products, residues, and wastewater sludges. These models incorporate fundamental principles such as the second law of thermodynamics, as well as detailed, empirically based descriptions of the mechanical separation of materials at the particulate level. They also account for the evolution of the recycling system over time. Including these real-world details and constraints enables realistic comparisons of recycling rates for different products and technological options and accurate assessments of options for improvement. We have applied this methodology to the recycling of complex, multimaterial products, specifically cars and electronic wastes, as well as wastewater and surface-water systems. This analysis clarifies how product design, recycling technology, and process metallurgy affect recycling rates and water quality. By linking these principles to technology-based design-for-recycling systems, we aim to provide a rigorous basis to reveal the opportunities and limits of recycling to ensure the supply of critical elements. These tools will also provide information to help policymakers reach appropriate decisions on how to design and run these systems and allow the general public to make informed choices when selecting products and services.

Industry is increasingly aware that sustainability combines environmental, societal, and economic considerations in product development and that this linkage, while driving improved performance, can pose both a business opportunity and a challenge. On one hand, innovations make good business sense by bringing new products to supply a growing market demand for sustainable goods. On the other hand, new regulatory standards demand cleaner, less-toxic products, which can be difficult to develop economically, and require an agreed-upon infrastructure to demonstrate compliance, which can also be difficult and expensive. In this article, we discuss how measurements, standards, and data, being developed and deployed worldwide by national metrology institutes (NMIs) and standards-developing organizations (SDOs), are helping industry enable the sustainable use of materials. Examples include bio-based polymers, lightweight automobiles, fly-ash-based concrete, and lead-free solders. Measurements, standards, and data also support energy efficiency and renewable energy and ease industry compliance with new and emerging regulations, including those that demand less-toxic components.

The cost and performance of materials have traditionally been the primary factors considered by designers of consumer products. Recent attempts to quantify the environmental sustainability of such products have stimulated the development of methods for assessing the reserves of raw materials compared to the demand for their use in manufacturing and impacts on energy resources. To a much more limited extent, these strategies also evaluate how chemical toxicity, arising from material production, use, and disposal, affects human and environmental health. The mechanisms and adverse impacts of toxic effects vary widely at different points within material life cycles, making it difficult to establish internally consistent methods and weighting criteria for quantitative evaluation of the environmental liability of consumer products. This article reviews advances in the methodology and application of health and ecological impact assessments of materials used in consumer products and argues for a stronger integration of toxicity metrics into materials informatics databases.

Materials play a major role in defining the sustainability performance of automobiles throughout their materials-production, manufacturing, use, and end-of-life stages. Materials production and manufacturing raise many sustainability issues, including resource scarcity and materials sourcing, energy and carbon intensity, and materials efficiency in parts fabrication. In the use stage, materials properties such as density and strength directly affect materials-mass requirements, which influence two dominant sustainability parameters for vehicles: fuel economy and service life. For conventional vehicles, the operation segment of the use stage accounts for about 85% of the total life-cycle energy consumption and greenhouse-gas emissions. Consequently, powertrain technologies and efficiencies as well as fuel-cycle processes control these impacts. Future trends in vehicle electrification will shift the magnitude and distribution of life-cycle impacts and the effectiveness of materials strategies for improving sustainability, such as lightweighting. In many cases, the materials-production stage could become a greater determinant in life-cycle impacts. With current vehicle end-of-life management infrastructure, 85% of materials are recyclable, but recovery of plastics and segregation of metal alloys represent opportunities for improvement. Life-cycle assessment and cost analysis provide the most comprehensive methods for evaluating the sustainability of materials strategies. Using a life-cycle framework, this article highlights the current and future materials challenges and opportunities driving vehicle sustainability performance.

This article summarizes the energy savings and environmental impacts of using traditional and bio-based fiber-reinforced polymer composites in place of conventional metal-based structures in a range of applications. In addition to reviewing technical achievements in improving material properties, we quantify the environmental impacts of the materials over the complete product life cycle, from material production through use and end of life, using life-cycle assessment (LCA).

Turbine engine performance, as measured by specific fuel consumption (defined as fuel consumed relative to the thrust produced by the engine), is a key criterion in engine selection. To achieve the specific fuel consumption required of modern engines, engineers combine advanced designs and materials to achieve higher operating temperatures and, therefore, higher engine efficiency. One of the difficulties of using advanced materials is that they exploit scarce, hard-to-replace elements to allow higher operating temperatures. In this article, we describe steps being taken by General Electric Co. and the turbine engine industry to continue to improve engines in a material space constrained by material availability. As a specific example, we focus on the transition metal rhenium.

Physical infrastructure, including buildings, roads, pipelines, bridges, power lines, communications networks, canals, and waterways, make up a substantial fraction of worldwide material usage and flows. Consequently, the overall mass of materials and the associated environmental impacts must be addressed to achieve sustainable development of infrastructure. This article surveys the magnitude of material use for infrastructure, including trends in the use per person, environmental impacts of the production and use of infrastructure materials, variations in the longevity of physical infrastructure, and changes in the recycling of infrastructure materials.

As the most abundant engineered material on Earth, concrete is essential to the physical infrastructure of all modern societies. There are no known materials that can replace concrete in terms of cost and availability. There are, however, environmental concerns, including the significant CO2 emissions associated with cement production, which create new incentives for university–industry collaboration to address concrete sustainability. Herein, we examine one aspect of this challenge—the translation of scientific understanding at the microscale into industrial innovation at the macroscale—by seeking improvements in cement-paste processing, performance, and sustainability through control of the mechanisms that govern microstructure development. Specifically, we consider modeling, simulation, and experimental advances in fracture, dissolution, precipitation, and hydration of cement paste precursors, as well as properties of the hardened cement paste within concrete. The aim of such studies is to optimize the chemical reactivity, mechanical performance, and other physical properties of cement paste to enable more sustainable processing routes for this ubiquitous material.

Energy-critical elements (ECEs) are chemical and isotopic species that are required for emerging sustainable energy sources and that might encounter supply disruptions. An oft-cited example is the rare-earth element neodymium used in high-strength magnets, but elements other than rare earths, for example, helium, are also considered ECEs. The relationships among abundance, markets, and geopolitics that constrain supply are at least as complex as the electronic and nuclear attributes that make ECEs valuable. In an effort to ensure supply for renewable-energy technologies, science decision makers are formulating policies to mitigate supply risk, sometimes without full view of the complexity of important factors, such as unanticipated market responses to policy, society’s needs for these elements in the course of basic research, and a lack of substitutes for utterly unique physical properties. This article places ECEs in historical context, highlights relevant market factors, and reviews policy recommendations made by various studies and governments. Actions taken by the United States and other countries are also described. Although availability and scarcity are related, many ECEs are relatively common yet their supply is at risk. Sustainable development requires informed action and cooperation between governments, industries, and researchers.

Rapid changes in energy availability lead to the question of whether the sustainable availability of energy implies the sustainable availability of materials and vice versa. In particular, many researchers assume that materials can be produced from any resource type, irrespective of scarcity, by providing enough energy. We revisit this issue here for two reasons: (1) To avoid significant disruptions in daily life, no more than a few percent of total energy production and materials usage can be diverted to support a transition to new energy sources. (2) Such a transition could also be problematic if it requires large quantities of materials that are byproducts of other large-scale production cycles, as any increase in the production of a byproduct typically requires an almost proportional increase in the production of the primary product. In turn, increased production of the primary product could require materials and energy expenditures that are too large to be practical. Both limitations have to be taken into account in future energy planning.

During this century, humankind must deal with increasing demand for energy and the growing impact of burning fossil fuels. Nuclear power, which presently produces 14% of global electricity, is a low-carbon-emissions alternative. However, the sustainability of nuclear power depends on the amounts of uranium and thorium available, the economics of their recovery from ore deposits, and the safety and security of nuclear materials. Unlike combustion of hydrocarbons, which determines the amount of fuel needed for a given amount of energy, nuclear reactions can create additional fissile isotopes. Hence, the choice of nuclear fuel cycle profoundly affects the size of the nuclear resource, as well as nuclear waste management and the risk of proliferation of nuclear weapons. We argue that uranium resources, identified and yet to be discovered, could sustain increases in nuclear power generation by a factor of two or three through the end of this century, even without advanced closed-fuel-cycle technologies.

Over the past 12 years, photovoltaics enjoyed an average growth of ∼45% per year that was affected only marginally by the recent global financial crisis. Industrial roadmaps and analysts’ forecasts share visions of solar power becoming a major contributor to national and global electricity grids, with several terawatts of cumulative deployment by 2050 or earlier. For photovoltaics technology to become a major sustainable player in a competitive power-generation market, it must provide abundant, affordable electricity, with environmental impacts dramatically lower than those from conventional power generation. This article summarizes the prospects in each of three basic aspects of sustainability, namely, system costs, environmental impacts, and resource availability, all of which are examined in the context of prospective life-cycle assessment. Indeed, these three aspects are closely related: Increasing the efficiency of material recovery by recycling spent modules will become increasingly important in resolving cost, resource, and environmental constraints on large-scale sustainable growth.

Given the increasing size of CO2-generating industries and the mounting awareness of their environmental impact, carbon-management technologies are expected to play an important role in curtailing environmental emissions in coming years. A major challenge in carbon management is the development of cost-effective, technologically compatible, and efficient CO2 capture and storage technologies. The development of energy-efficient solvent, solid-sorbent, and membrane materials to capture CO2 from industrial exhaust streams can take improvements in process efficiency one step further. Also, the permanent storage of CO2 in geologic formations is critical to the success of carbon-management technologies and requires better understanding of interactions of CO2 with underground materials. These and other materials challenges must be solved to make carbon capture and storage an economically viable and reliable technology to be adopted by the power and product manufacturing industries.

Over the next few decades, the challenge of water scarcity is expected to grow more acute as water demands from the power generation, agriculture, industrial, and municipal sectors all increase. Energy production requires copious amounts of water, with the volume of water used by power generation ranking second only to that used for agriculture. This article reviews options for managing the water requirements associated with power generation. Although the effects of both existing and emerging modes of power generation on water use trends are explored, the primary focus is on thermal systems, which account for the majority of existing capacity.