Sustainable Metals Management

What’s in a name? What, in particular, is metals management’ all about? I suspect that my ‘ colleagues assumed that I would have a good answer, given that the endowed Sandoz Chair I occupied from 1992 until my retirement in 2000 was entitled “Environment and Management”, and at INSEAD I created a Center for Management of Environmental Resources (CMER). Metals are a subset of resources, et voila! However, in all honesty, management, as such, was never my core competence (to use another phrase popularized by business schools). Here comes the shocking secret. We used the word management in those titles because INSEAD is a business school where everything has to have an application to business. For my colleagues at INSEAD management is what we supposedly teach. Good management, they (we) think, distinguishes successful enterprises from unsuccessful ones. For some of our graduates, management is what they give professional advice to corporate clients about. For the rest of our graduates it is the umbrella word that describes their choice of career. The implication conveyed by our choice of words is that metals can be regarded as one category of environmental resources, and that resources – including environmental resources – can be managed, in somewhat the same way that a corporation can be managed. It is not even too far-fetched to suggest that long run sustainability might be a management problem.

What's in a name? What, in particular, is metals management' all about? I suspect that my ' colleagues assumed that I would have a good answer, given that the endowed Sandoz Chair I occupied from 1992 until my retirement in 2000 was entitled "e;Environment and Management"e;, and at INSEAD I created a Center for Management of Environmental Resources (CMER). Metals are a subset of resources, et voila! However, in all honesty, management, as such, was never my core competence (to use another phrase popularized by business schools). Here comes the shocking secret. We used the word management in those titles because INSEAD is a business school where everything has to have an application to business. For my colleagues at INSEAD management is what we supposedly teach. Good management, they (we) think, distinguishes successful enterprises from unsuccessful ones. For some of our graduates, management is what they give professional advice to corporate clients about. For the rest of our graduates it is the umbrella word that describes their choice of career. The implication conveyed by our choice of words is that metals can be regarded as one category of environmental resources, and that resources - including environmental resources - can be managed, in somewhat the same way that a corporation can be managed. It is not even too far-fetched to suggest that long run sustainability might be a management problem.

What’s in a name? What, in particular, is metals management’ all about? I suspect that my ‘ colleagues assumed that I would have a good answer, given that the endowed Sandoz Chair I occupied from 1992 until my retirement in 2000 was entitled “Environment and Management”, and at INSEAD I created a Center for Management of Environmental Resources (CMER). Metals are a subset of resources, et voila! However, in all honesty, management, as such, was never my core competence (to use another phrase popularized by business schools). Here comes the shocking secret. We used the word management in those titles because INSEAD is a business school where everything has to have an application to business. For my colleagues at INSEAD management is what we supposedly teach. Good management, they (we) think, distinguishes successful enterprises from unsuccessful ones. For some of our graduates, management is what they give professional advice to corporate clients about. For the rest of our graduates it is the umbrella word that describes their choice of career. The implication conveyed by our choice of words is that metals can be regarded as one category of environmental resources, and that resources – including environmental resources – can be managed, in somewhat the same way that a corporation can be managed. It is not even too far-fetched to suggest that long run sustainability might be a management problem.

Sustainability and Metals.- Outlines of a Sustainable Metals Industry.- Metallic Raw Materials — Constituents of Our Economy.- Economy, Thermodynamics, and Sustainability.- Aluminium.- Prospects for a Sustainable Aluminum Industry.- Towards a Sustainable Copper Industry?.- An Application of Exergy Accounting to Five Basic Metal Industries.- Entropy as a Measure for Resource Consumption — Application to Primary and Secondary Copper Production.- Dematerialization of the Metals Turnover.- Sustainability Strategies in Field Trial.- Metals Materials Flows.- Limits of Metal Recycling.- Secondary Materials in Steel Production and Recycling.- Optimisation Possibilities of Copper Smelting and -Processing.- The Hamburger Aluminium-Werk GMBH’s Contribution to a Sustainable Closed Loop Aluminium System.- Sustainable Use of Copper.- Ecological, Social, Toxicological, and Cultural Effects.- Heavy Metals in the Netherlands.- Toxic Effects of Metals and Metal Compounds.- Metallurgical Plants and Chemicals Industry as Challenges to Environmental Protection in the 19th Century.- Copper Mining and Metallurgy in Prehistoric and the More Recent Past.- Social and Ecological Consequences of the Bauxite-Energy-Aluminium Product Line.- The Ok Tedi Pages.- Product Design and Use.- Metals and Plastics - Competition or Synergy?.- Sustainability-Optimised Material Selection and Product Design at Audi.- Recycling of Electronic Waste Material.- Sustainable Development of Microelectronics Industry.- The Role of Metals for Designing Products and Solutions in the Context of a Sustainable Society.