Pecologix

The U.S. harvests around 68 million metric tons of wheat each year. There are two ways to increase this amount: One is to change farming practices by, say, increasing the amount of cultivated or irrigated acreage. The other is to breed the crop to be more prolific by introducing attributes that make it mature at [...]

We find that total consumption of PET resin grew at 2.7% per year over the period of the study, reaching 5.01 million metric tons in 2007. This growth was driven largely by the beverage packaging market, which accounted for 55% of consumption in 2007. About a quarter of PET bottles are collected for recycling, a [...]

The analysis of historical production trends of iron ore and crude steel for the major iron ore and steel producing countries indicates that, incidentally, the major iron ore producing countries are not the major steel producing countries and vice-versa. For example, in 2005, Brazil’s iron ore production was 322 Mt whereas its steel production was [...]

This paper shows how thermodynamics and in particular the exergy analysis can help to assess the degradation degree of earth’s mineral resources. The resources may be physically assessed as its exergy content as well as the exergy required for replacing them from a complete degraded state to the conditions in which they are currently presented [...]

With increasing consumption of material by human activity, the extent of human influence relative to nature in the mobilization of metals and other elements on Earth continues to grow. Recognizing people as modern geomorphic agents, I produced global data layers at 1° × 1° of human-mediated mass flows (coal combustion, biomass burning, and mining) and [...]

Based on economic and policy considerations that appear to be unconstrained by geophysics, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) generated forty carbon production and emissions scenarios. In this paper, we develop a base-case scenario for global coal production based on the physical multi-cycle Hubbert analysis of historical production data. Areas with large resources but [...]

The results show increasing global trade with global direct material trade flows reaching about 10 billion tonnes in 2005, corresponding to a physical trade volume of about 20 billion tonnes (adding both total imports and total exports). The share from European countries is declining, mainly in favour of Asian countries. The dominant traded commodity in [...]