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Advances in electronic technologies have the potential to enable energy efficiency and climate mitigation but may also create climate impacts due to resource and energy use across the product life cycle. These tradeoffs revolve around the way electronics are designed, manufactured, purchased, used, and disposed and the ability to shift these systems toward resource efficiency. A promising strategy for consumer electronics is to facilitate adoption of lightweight, energy‐efficient, multi‐functional devices as replacements for the many single‐function electronic products currently owned. However, consumer preferences and willingness to make this shift remain unclear. Here, a survey of 1,011 adults across the United States demonstrated theoretical potential for material efficiency gains, as respondents indicated willingness to accept a smaller number of multi‐functional devices, such as smartphones, as replacements for specialized electronics, including digital cameras, camcorders, and MP3 players. However, when actually choosing electronics to be used for common functions, such as watching TV, getting directions, surfing the Internet, or writing an email, consumers indicated strong preferences for products with the highest perceived quality for those tasks. Multi‐functional devices such as tablets were only reported to be used for a small number of the functions they can provide and were typically redundant complements to existing products, rather than substitutes. Findings suggest a limit to material intensity reductions via device convergence alone. Dematerialization of this sector will likely require coupled efforts to design multi‐functional products for improved performance while also improving the material and climate footprint of products that consumers are unwilling to replace. This article met the requirements for a gold‐gold JIE data openness badge described at http://jie.click/badges. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States is not only the world's largest economy, but it is also one of the world's largest consumers of natural resources. The country, which is inhabited by some 5% of the world's population, uses roughly one-fifth of the global primary energy supply and 15% of all extracted materials. This article explores long-term trends and patterns of material use in the United States. Based on a material flow account (MFA) that is fully consistent with current standards of economy-wide MFAs and covers domestic extraction, imports, and exports of materials for a 135-year period, we investigated the evolution of the U.S. industrial metabolism. This process was characterized by an 18-fold increase in material consumption, a multiplication of material use per capita, and a shift from renewable biomass toward mineral and fossil resources. In spite of considerable improvements in material intensity, no dematerialization has happened so far; in contrast to other high-income countries, material use has not stabilized since the 1970s, but has continued to grow. This article compares patterns and trends of material use in the United States with those in Japan and the United Kingdom and discusses the factors underlying the disproportionately high level of U.S. per capita resource consumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stocks of products in use are the pivotal engines that drive anthropogenic metal cycles: They support the lives of people by providing services to them; they are sources for future secondary resources (scrap); and demand for in-use stocks generates demand for metals. Despite their great importance and their impacts on other parts of the metal cycles and the environment, the study of in-use stocks has heretofore been widely neglected. Here we investigate anthropogenic and geogenic iron stocks in the United States (U.S.) by analyzing the iron cycle over the period 1900–2004. Our results show the following. (i) Over the last century, the U.S. iron stock in use increased to 3,200 Tg (million metric tons), which is the same order of magnitude as the remaining U.S. iron stock in identified ores. On a global scale, anthropogenic iron stocks are less significant compared with natural ores, but their relative importance is increasing. (ii) With a perfect recycling system, the U.S. could substitute scrap utilization for domestic mining. (iii) The per-capita in-use iron stock reached saturation at 11–12 metric tons in ≈1980. This last finding, if applicable to other economies as well, could allow a significant improvement of long-term forecasting of steel demand and scrap availability in emerging market economies and therefore has major implications for resource sustainability, recycling technology, and industrial and governmental policy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]