• Materials have environmental impacts throughout their lifecycles.
• Applying a life cycle perspective can help identify opportunities and lead to sustainable solutions that help improve environmental performance, societal image, and economic benefits.

How society uses materials is fundamental to our economic and environmental future. Global competition for finite resources will intensify as world population and economies grow. More productive and less impactful use of materials helps society remain economically competitive, contributes to prosperity, and protects the environment in a resource constrained future.

Both U.S. and global consumption of materials has been increasing rapidly. People have consumed more resources in the last 50 years than all previous history. And of all the materials consumed in the U.S. over the last 100 years, more than half were consumed in the last 25 years. This increasing consumption has come at a cost to the environment, including habitat destruction, biodiversity loss, overly stressed fisheries, and desertification. Material consumption is also associated with an estimated 42 percent of total U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Failure to find more productive and sustainable ways to extract, use, and manage materials, and change the relationship between material consumption and growth, has grave implications for our economy and society.

By looking at a product’s entire lifecycle, humans can find new opportunities to reduce environmental impacts, conserve resources, and reduce costs. For example, a product is re-designed so, it is manufactured using different, fewer, less toxic and more durable materials. It is designed so that at the end of its useful life it can be readily disassembled. The manufacturer maintains a relationship with the customer to ensure best use of the product, its maintenance and return at end-of-life. This helps the manufacturer identify changing needs of their customers, create customer loyalty, and reduce material supply risk. Further, the manufacturer has a similar relationship with its supply chain, which helps the manufacturer respond more quickly to changing demands, including reducing supply chain environmental impacts.

Materials have environmental impacts throughout their lifecycles. The major stages in a material’s lifecycle is raw material acquisition, materials manufacture, production, use/ reuse/maintenance, movement or transport of materials, and waste management.

Applying a life cycle perspective can help identify opportunities and lead to sustainable solutions that help improve environmental performance, societal image, and economic benefits. Businesses do not always consider their supply chains or the use and end-of-life processes associated with their products. Government actions often focus on a specific country or region, and not on the impacts or benefits that can occur in other regions or that are attributable to their own levels of consumption. Currently, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) is researching lifecycle perspectives in the following areas of application:

• Nanotechnology,
• The Li-ion battery project,
• Biofuels,
• Consumer products,
• Impact assessment,
• Energy analysis (Note: Energy is a measure of all the direct and indirect energy of the material, services, and information required to make a product or sustain a system.), and
• Sustainable materials management.