Resource convergence and resource power: towards new concepts for material efficiency

Material efficiency is not a panacea, but it lies at the intersection of many problems of global sustainability. Reducing the usage of a single material in a value chain may require ingenuity and wide cooperation, but conceptually it is not a problem. When the problem stretches to several resources in changing circumstances, we have to understand the linkages between resources and the power, and the influence of each resource in decision-making in different settings. In this paper, we concisely go from the time dimension to a very short history of resource thinking, and then introduce our resource convergence concept. Using text mining on a sample of articles linking different resources, we show in a 'visual literature review' how resource convergence emerges from unrelated texts. To demonstrate one new method under the resource convergence umbrella, we use a case example with our Resource Power Index method. In our opinion, mastering complexity will be the key to solving the challenges we are facing, and mastering resource convergence and translating it into material efficiency is one of the central problems. What we show in this paper is a core framework and some details of the direction we see as worth pursuing.