Is gravel becoming scarce? Evaluating the local criticality of construction aggregates

Dimitra Ioannidou, Grégoire Meylan, Guido Sonnemann and Guillaume Habert

Resources, Conservation & Recycling, 2017, vol. 126, issue C, 25-33

Abstract: Natural aggregates are considered an immense natural resource at the global level; however some regions face a supply constraint due to the overexploitation of natural aggregates in construction. This paper presents an assessment of the local criticality of quarried aggregates by adapting the methodology for metal criticality determination to the characteristics of construction aggregates. Two approaches, strong and weak locality, are envisaged to examine different substitution scenarios in the case of local supply constraint. The adapted methodology examines three dimensions: Supply Risk, Environmental Implications and Vulnerability to Supply Restriction. The application of the methodology to the cantons of Switzerland shows that inside a country, the criticality is driven by the Supply Risk, which depends on the surface and number of quarries and their distribution in the region. A comparison of the supply risk of aggregates with the supply risk of steel shows that for most of the cantons the supply risk of natural aggregates is lower. The application of this methodology at a world scale will indicate highly critical regions and enable policymakers to define measures for ensuring a sustainable growth, either by regulating the extraction of aggregates or by demonstrating the local need to consider the use of other materials, apart from concrete.

Keywords: Aggregates; Criticality; Supply risk; Locality (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0921344917301957
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:recore:v:126:y:2017:i:c:p:25-33

DOI: 10.1016/j.resconrec.2017.07.016

Access Statistics for this article

Resources, Conservation & Recycling is currently edited by Ming Xu

More articles in Resources, Conservation & Recycling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kai Meng ().