Epilogue - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 505

will in all cases certainly increase into the future. How can Man thus decrease these
costs? There are two alternatives: either conservation via the stopping or (slowing
of) extraction or technological improvement.
The concept of replacement can be used for all fuel and non-fuel minerals, regard-
less of their chemical composition and/or concentration. Focusing on fossil fuels,
they must be conserved by the increased employment of renewable energy sources.
In the same way, stopping or decelerating thermodynamic rarity of non-fuel mine-
rals will largely come from the use of greater resource-e cient techniques as already
explained in Chap. 16 such as designing for recyclability and dissasembly, reducing
the number of alloys used, avoiding the design of monstrous hybrids 5 , symbiosis of
industrial complexes, increasing the e ciency of smelters to avoid metal losses in
slags, increasing the throughput of scrap, etc (Wernick and Themelis, 1998). The
issue is whether it is more important to preserve minerals -here and now- or believe
that technology will surpass any scarcity.
Conservation means, in fact, avoided replacement. Indeed, one can associate a
cost of replacement to each and every act of conservation, whether relating to mi-
neral resources or any natural resource generally. The cost of replacement acts as a
mind barrier which prevents further deliberate destructions. The more irreplaceable
an object, the stronger the desire to conserve it - irrecoverability would need eternal
conservation. Therefore taking into account replacement costs is a way of coming
to terms with the debt left for future generations.
It is also important to recognise that technological innovation is as vital as the
conservation of resources by not extracting them. An essential fact is that replace-
ment costs using the “best available technologies” decrease as knowledge improves
with their evolution over time a straightforward and quantitative indicator of tech-
nological achievements. Therefore, if the improvement of best available technologies
is a reflex of increased embodied knowledge, one should see to what extent it de-
creases the debt left to coming generations. Nevertheless, it is not clear whether
any new technology, either directly or indirectly, improves e ciency in production
processes or thus diminishes the negative balance provoked by today's population.
This is because of the rebound effect, in which better resource e ciencies may lead
to increased resource usage as happened in the past with the steam engine or with
the intense use of scarce materials triggered with the proliferation of the so called
resources-saving-ICTs today.
Anyhow, the concept of replacement cost apprehends both ideas: conservation
and technological improvements. Yet conservation goes beyond repair, restoration,
or replacement. It is a value that requires a change in lifestyle brought about
through education. Education is an indispensable tool not just in terms of con-
servation but also in the learning of technological innovation. Education systems
must cope with both. In fact, an intense tech oriented society should need to be
5 According to McDonough and Braungart (2002), monstrous hybrids are devices with high num-
ber of different materials intrinsically di cult to recycle, i.e. highly entropic devices.