Substituting for scarce resources

Description

Substituting for scarce resources involves identifying and implementing alternative materials, technologies, or processes to replace limited or depleted resources. This strategy aims to maintain production, services, or societal functions while reducing dependency on vulnerable supplies. Practical actions include developing synthetic substitutes, recycling, or redesigning products to use more abundant resources, thereby mitigating supply disruptions, cost increases, and environmental impacts associated with resource scarcity.

Implementation

During the early nineteenth century whale oil was the preferred fuel for household illumination. A dwindling supply prompted innovations in the lighting industry, including the invention of gas and kerosene lamps and Edison's carbon-filament electric bulb.

Claim

Plentiful resources can be used in place of those that become scarce. Analysts speak of an Age of Substitutability and point, for example, to nanotubes, tiny cylinders of carbon whose molecular structure forms fibers a hundred times as strong as steel, at one sixth the weight. As technologies that use more-abundant resources substitute for those needing less-abundant ones -- for example, ceramics in place of tungsten, fiber optics in place of copper wire, aluminum cans in place of tin ones -- the demand for and the price of the less-abundant resources decline.