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The technosphere consists of material stocks accumulated by human activities, which can include processing residue, such as slag. Various smelting processes generate slag, and some valuable elements are concentrated in this by-product. In this review, the extraction of critical and strategic metals from non-ferrous slags is discussed. Critical and strategic metals are materials that are vital for the nation’s economy and defence, as well as its industries, and have common features, such as expected shortfalls, increasing demand, and few substitutions. There are several definitions, methods, and classifications of critical and strategic elements by different organisations. In this study, reports from seven institutions around the world are summarised, and a list of recommended critical and strategic metals is presented. Non-ferrous slags contain a considerable amount of critical and strategic elements, and research on technology and process development using both pyro- and hydrometallurgical methods is very attractive. When it comes to the extraction of values from slag and the development of technology, it is not only important to consider the economic aspect but also to ensure the processes are low in emissions and energy consumption but high in efficiency and recycling.

Civilizational development entails the formation of a contradiction between the technosphere and the biosphere, with the consequences of greenhouse effects; it is carried out within the framework of technological structures independent of socio-economic formations. Governing bodies and activities that provide significant growth (or control planetary environmental safety) are key factors, as are technological innovations, with industry and consumption playing a key role in the spread of a new technological order. The technosphere, as the main product of civilizational development, has gone through a number of pre-industrial and at least five industrial technological modes and will most likely move into the sixth (post-industrial) technological mode. The main causes of greenhouse gases are gas emissions, methane, and ozone. The rise in the 20th century of the temperature on the surface of the planet is a result of a reaction to anthropogenic emissions of gases, including accidental oxides, tropospheric ozone and its “expectations”, halogenated hydrocarbons, nitrogen oxides, etc.

Information transmission via communication between agents is ubiquitous on Earth, and is a vital facet of living systems. In this paper, we aim to quantify this rate of information transmission associated with Earth’s biosphere and technosphere (i.e., a measure of global information flow) by means of a heuristic order-of-magnitude model. By adopting ostensibly conservative values for the salient parameters, we estimate that the global information transmission rate for the biosphere might be ∼1024 bits/s, and that it may perhaps exceed the corresponding rate for the current technosphere by ∼9 orders of magnitude. However, under the equivocal assumption of sustained exponential growth, we find that information transmission in the technosphere can potentially surpass that of the biosphere ∼90 years in the future, reflecting its increasing dominance.

Throughout the 20th century, several thinkers noticed that Technology was becoming a global phenomenon. More recently, US geologist Peter Haff claimed that a Technosphere is now in place and can be conceived as a new Earth geological system. This unprecedented situation is creating enormous challenges not only for our species, since more and more of its members are now dependent on the subsistence of this man-made sphere, but also for other species and natural ecosystems that have become increasingly dependent on it. Perhaps the most crucial of these challenges is the sustainability of the Technosphere itself. In the first part of the article, I attempted a critical reconstruction of Haff’s Technosphere concept. The second part is dedicated to analyzing how the unsustainability of the Technosphere represents a global catastrophic risk and ultimately an existential risk.

Nowadays, the conceptualization of circular economy is an attractive managerial tool among governments and businesses throughout the word, while ecosystem services are a contentious issue due to the particular needs of humans’ well-being. At this review the interactions between the principles of ecosystem services and the circular economy were investigated in the light of inter-organizational systems. This evaluation was based on more and more complex processes, while the integration of the growing circular economy concept within the shrinking parent ecosystem unveiled challenges and constraints for products’ end of life and quality. It was argued that: (a) The existence of social and people-related barriers can be considered under three groups, namely, the “sustainable provision and modeling schemes”, “socio-cultural appreciation and payment schemes”, and “regulatory and maintenance schemes”, (b) The impacts of circular economy—ecosystem services toward an inter-organizational functional stream model associated with distinguished proactive and post treatment risk values (c) The functionality and the accountability of the technosphere are the two critical components to support the restorative and the regenerative perspectives of the biosphere. The aforementioned findings unveiled new emerging paths to be further investigated, offering a deeper appraisal of circular economy under the inter-organizational perception.