Increasing global population and rising levels of wealth are raising demands for services such as shelter and mobility, leading to greater resource use and environmental impacts. Circular strategies can reduce the resources required for these services. However, the potential of circular strategies to reduce material demand is rarely quantified. Here, we present a method to link service, product, and resource use with circular...

Summary Prospective life cycle assessment (LCA) needs to deal with the large epistemological uncertainty about the future to support more robust future environmental impact assessments of technologies. This study proposes a novel approach that systematically changes the background processes in a prospective LCA based on scenarios of an integrated assessment model (IAM), the IMAGE model. Consistent worldwide scenarios from IMAG...

Summary In response to the unprecedented decline in global natural resource endowments, the so‐called nexus framework is gaining increasing influence on resource management practices. In this research, we approach the resource nexus through the concept of nexus pathways. Nexus pathways are configurations that resource flows follow along supply chains leading to the combined use of two or more resources. Three general types of...

Summary Even though tantalum has a high economic importance and is associated with armed conflict, the use of tantalum throughout the supply chain of importing economies is not well understood. This article adds to existing qualitative descriptions of the tantalum supply chain by performing a quantified substance flow analysis (SFA) of tantalum for Europe in the year 2007. The exercise is meant to show how readily available st...