Sustainability, no matter how one defines it, requires clear understanding of our society's environmental impacts. Therefore, research quantifying how society meets its material needs, depending on its socioeconomic and technological contexts, provides critical information to aid sustainability efforts worldwide. Once these aspects of society are reasonably understood in relation to the past, further analysis can model future supplies and demands.
The emerging field of industrial ecology organizes societal needs into two forms of material and energy: stocks, which constitute material in-use by society along with the embodied energy of those materials, and flows, which encompass materials and energy as they move among anthropogenic reservoirs, or between anthropogenic and natural reservoirs. Within this scientific framework, researchers have primarily focused on the quantification and analysis of all the aspects of energy stocks and flows. As a result, the knowledge surrounding material stocks and flows, especially for metals, is lacking in comparison.

It is at this juncture that the Stocks and Flows (STAF) Project exists. As a research group, we focus on the characterization and quantification of the “metallic metabolism” of society; the socioeconomic and technological drivers of this metabolism; and the final environmental effects of the anthropogenic metal system.

The STAF Project evaluates both current and historical stocks and flows of technologically significant materials throughout nine world regions.The STAF project goes further than mere calculation of various reservoirs and flows, integrating its metal cycles with environmental data to assess environmental and policy implications.

Drawing largely upon mineralogical and geological records, economic data, industrial association publications, and environmental reports, the STAF team has completely characterized the copper, zinc and silver cycle for relevant countries throughout the world. Current cycle analyzes focus on nickel, tin, chromium, tungsten and various steels. STAF researchers apply their knowledgeable models of our resource use, predicting several future technological development scenarios and their environmental and economic impacts.

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