Resources

Elemental sustainability

A shortage of resources

Within the chemical sector, including pharmaceuticals, there is a heavy reliance on petroleum feedstocks, but also various metals and other elements. The renewable energy revolution is shifting the balance even more towards metals, especially those needed for battery technology. If high demand for critical raw materials, particularly in catalysis and energy storage, goes unabated, we will run out of economically viable sources of essential materials (Hunt et al., 2015). While we continue to mine virgin ores, labour conditions and the resulting environmental pollution and health impacts in some regions have been heavily criticised (Banza Lubaba Nkulu et al., 2018), yet demand only increases. All these factors raise serious questions over the sustainability of many vital elements.

The EU has prioritised critical raw materials based on their economic importance as well as supply risk.

The materials of most concern are those vital to the economy with a high supply risk. The rare earth metals and platinum group metals are unsurprising examples, but also some less glamorous elements such as boron and magnesium also meet this criteria. The EU is entirely reliant on imports of these elements.

• Rare earth elements are used in renewable energy generation (e.g. wind turbines) and energy storage (batteries).

• Platinum group metals (platinum, palladium, ruthenium, rhodium, osmium, and iridium) find use as reaction catalysts and in electronic components.

• Boron is used in magnets and some types of glass.

• Magnesium features in a number of alloys and is used in steel-making.

Palladium, boron, and magnesium also have prominent uses in the chemistry required for pharmaceutical production, each being used in common cross-coupling reactions (Buskes and Blanco, 2020).

Elemental sustainability actions

Broadly speaking, there are two options to improve elemental sustainability. Firstly, we can recycle materials more completely with improved waste collection and with greater efficiency to preserve the quality of those materials. This fits with the objectives of Green Chemistry and a Circular Economy. Secondly, we can replace some elements with more abundant materials, and invent alternative technologies to protect against supply risk and the depletion of finite resources. This is a topic of much interest in the field of catalysis, where conventional metal catalysts tend to be expensive and based on relatively rare elements.