title: Novel Indicators for the Quantification of Resilience in Critical Material Supply Chains, with a 2010 Rare Earth Crisis Case Study.
abstract: We introduce several new resilience metrics for quantifying the resilience of critical material supply chains to disruptions and validate these metrics using the 2010 rare earth element (REE) crisis as a case study. Our method is a novel application of Event Sequence Analysis, supplemented with interviews of actors across the entire supply chain. We discuss resilience mechanisms in quantitative terms-time lags, response speeds, and maximum magnitudes-and in light of cultural differences between Japanese and European corporate practice. This quantification is crucial if resilience is ever to be taken into account in criticality assessments and a step toward determining supply and demand elasticities in the REE supply chain. We find that the REE system showed resilience mainly through substitution and increased non-Chinese primary production, with a distinct role for stockpiling. Overall, annual substitution rates reached 10% of total demand. Non-Chinese primary production ramped up at a speed of 4% of total market volume per year. The compound effect of these mechanisms was that recovery from the 2010 disruption took two years. The supply disruption did not nudge a system toward an appreciable degree of recycling. This finding has important implications for the circular economy concept, indicating that quite a long period of sustained material constraints will be necessary for a production-consumption system to naturally evolve toward a circular configuration.
authors.affiliation: School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, Yale University , 06511 New Haven, Connecticut, United States.|Institute for Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University , Leiden 2311 EZ, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Benjamin
authors.identifier: 0000-0002-0136-5656
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Sprecher
authors.forename: Ichiro
authors.initials: I
authors.lastname: Daigo
authors.affiliation: Sustainable Consumption Institute, The University of Manchester, Manchester M13 9PL, The United Kingdom.
authors.forename: Wouter
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Spekkink
authors.affiliation: Faculty of Biology and Biotechnology, Ruhr-Universitaẗ Bochum , Bochum 44801, Germany.
authors.forename: Matthijs
authors.initials: M
authors.lastname: Vos
authors.affiliation: Institute for Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University , Leiden 2311 EZ, Netherlands.
authors.forename: René
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Kleijn
authors.forename: Shinsuke
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Murakami
authors.affiliation: Institute for Environmental Sciences (CML), Leiden University , Leiden 2311 EZ, Netherlands.
authors.forename: Gert Jan
authors.initials: GJ
authors.lastname: Kramer
mesh_terms: D006801:Humans; D008674:Metals, Rare Earth; D059027:Recycling
chemical_list: D008674:Metals, Rare Earth