siliconindia | | February 20188IN MY OPINIONTHE INTERNET OF MATERIALS (IOM)By Sandra Aguilar & Christopher Bruce, Founders, endswapper Headquartered in California, endswapper enables businesses to maximize material value, utility, and sustainability through its suite of digital solutions in the areas of Internet of Materials, Blockchain, Circular Economies, Open-source, AI, and many others.M aterials are the essential matter of things, in part, defining societies and cul-tures. The stone, iron and bronze ages reflect the im-portance of materials and the fundamental necessity of materials in daily life. While today we live in an information age, materials are no less fundamental. The importance of materials offers a primary, objective basis for materi-al sustainability. As consumers, we are all stakeholders, and we suggest a universal responsibility for resources and their environmental stewardship. From an enterprise perspective, im-proved financial performance and risk management performance provides profit based incentives for material sustainability within the supply chain. Furthermore, sustainability, as a cat-alyst for innovation, and a basis to engage and connect with consumers, completes the business case for mate-rial sustainability. The following discussion of ma-terials seeks to emphasize the magni-tude of the global materials industry and the gaps in material stewardship, e.g., landfilling materials with unreal-ized value and/or utility. In light of re-cent and ongoing discussions regard-ing relative material sustainability, we think it is worth noting that we do not identify or advocate material prefer-ences. We advocate for data and inno-vation. Relative material sustainabili-ty is a moving target. Considerations such as water, energy and technology can have swift and significant impact on the relative sustainability of mate-rials. The global import/export value of materials is almost $3.5 trillion an-nually. Total tonnage is in excess of two billion tons annually. For plastic alone, recent research estimates that 8.3 billion metric tons of plastic have ever been produced with about 30 per-cent still in use and nine percent hav-ing been recycled. Plastics and metals represent the majority of value and metal and paper represent the great-est tonnage with more than 1.6 billion tons and 400 million metric tons re-spectively. To provide some additional per-spective, most materials will spend some time on a truck, somewhere in the supply chain, even if the primary transportation mode is air, marine or railway. Using 40,000 pounds as a truckload and a little more than 2.4 billion tons in annual materials, that would equal more than 122 million truckloads. If placed end-to-end, the trucks would circle the earth 1.75 times. We remind the reader that this is an annual measure. Globally, municipal solid waste (MSW) is estimated at more than 1.3 billion tons annually, with an estimat-ed cost of more than $205 billion. An estimated two million people act as informal waste pickers contributing to international markets for recycling. The top twenty-five countries for MSW recyclers highlight how much room there is to improve recycling rates globally. Germany at the top of the list has a recycling rate of 66.1 per-cent, only the top ten exceed 50 per-Christopher Bruce
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