Keynote: Emerging Professional Opportunities in Sustainable Materials Management

A new profession with career paths are taking shape to support the materials regeneration for societal sustainability and growth. Technical knowledge and understanding for materials manufacturing is rapidly changing. Work force development is underway to support this new profession. Rewarding and purposeful opportunities are being presented to the young professionals trained in traditional STEM education. The opportunities are being built around the two main grand challenges of this century – energy conservation and environmental management. New exciting prospects around materials circularity are opening up. Materials are the enablers of all kinds of technologies we rely on today to support human life and happiness. With global population approaching ten billion by the middle of this century, scientific advances have to keep pace to maintain the materials availability. Metals and materials production from primary sources, such as ore, are highly energy intensive, expensive and environmentally unfriendly. Materials are non-renewable and, therefore, their supply is limited. Post-consumer as well as manufacturing wastes are valuable secondary resources. Most structural and functional materials used today can be regenerated and put back into service at a much lower cost and energy consumption through conscious reuse, recycling and recovery programs. Most production wastes, such as mineral processing tailings, mechanical processing swarfs and solid pyrometallurgical processing effluents, as well as, post-consumer wastes from the aerospace, automotive, energy-storage and electronic industries, present tremendous opportunities to improve resource productivity. To ensure secure materials supply and attenuate supply-demand imbalance, it is of utmost importance to look at opportunities to regenerate materials from secondary sources and put them back to use. This presentation will describe case-studies of technological developments, that will form the basis for an emerging profession.