Background
Since the Stone Age, mining the earth’s crust has played a key role in providing minerals (mineral fuels, iron & ferro-alloys, non-ferrous metals, precious metals, industrial metals and construction minerals). The minerals are put into commission, processed and used in the anthroposphere. They accumulate in anthropogenic deposits, such as building stock and landfills, and circulate in products such as cars and mobile phones (Figure 1). Studies at Yale University demonstrated that for some metals (e.g. copper) the economically extractable amount in the upper earth crust is of the same order of magnitude as the resources in the anthroposphere. This raises the fair question of whether mining the anthroposphere will play a major role in the provision of materials to the commodity market in the future.
Secondary materials (from anthropogenic deposits) can be of similar quality as the primary materials (from geogenic deposits). Consequently, they compete with each other on the commodity market. For several decades, geogenic deposits (resources) and the economically extractable shares (reserves) have been inventoried by e.g. National Geological Surveys in order to provide information about the availability of primary materials in the foreseeable future. In contrast, the future availability of secondary materials and inventories for anthropogenic deposits are neither known nor reported. This prevents, firstly, a comparison of resources/reserves between primary and secondary materials and as a consequence, secondly, the integrated information on the availability of materials from reaching the future commodity market.