7 Material-service Systems for Sustainable Resource Management
91
With these systems, material suppliers are in control of resources and therefore have
significant incentive to revalorise them in collaboration with collectors, recoverers
and recyclers. After introducing the concept of MSS, the paper explores the expected
benefits, enablers and challenges of the proposed service systems. In this research we
take a resource-centric view of materials and the outcomes of their transformations
over the production, use and end of life phases. We pose that resources have multiple
states including raw resources, produced resources, wholesale resources, operative
resources, obsolete resources, recoverable resources, recovered resources and revalorised resources. We define materials as raw resources and products as produced
resources.
7.2 Literature
7.2.1 Materials as a Service
This research on materials as a service has been influenced by two main concepts:
Material Matters (Rau and Oberhuber 2016); and Chemical Looping (Stoughton
and Votta 2003). Materials Matter is the title of a book by Thomas Rau and Sabine
Oberhuber capturing their vision that it is service, not ownership, the answer to
facilitate an unlimited use of materials and the elimination of waste in the construction
sector (Rau and Oberhuber 2016). To enable this shift, they have proposed an online
registry of material passports, which allows to know where materials are located,
and preserve and reuse materials while saving costs. With this information, obsolete
buildings become a mine of materials.
Research on chemical leasing (Stoughton and Votta 2003), referring to the selling
of the function performed by a chemical, is also related to offering materials as a
service. However, this work has mainly focussed on effective use of chemicals for
cleaning and coating purpose in manufacturing (e.g. charging customers by m2 of
coated surface rather than Kg of paint). Hence, it does not address the proposed
vision to manage material resources throughout the entire supply chain.
7.2.2 Ownership and Business Models
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property including
objects such materials and products, and land, real estate and intellectual property. In traditional business models, the property of objects and the rights over
them are exchanged as a result of financial transactions between sellers and buyers.
Consumers, for example, buy goods from producers or retailers and as a result own
new products. Use and result oriented product-service systems are business models
91
With these systems, material suppliers are in control of resources and therefore have
significant incentive to revalorise them in collaboration with collectors, recoverers
and recyclers. After introducing the concept of MSS, the paper explores the expected
benefits, enablers and challenges of the proposed service systems. In this research we
take a resource-centric view of materials and the outcomes of their transformations
over the production, use and end of life phases. We pose that resources have multiple
states including raw resources, produced resources, wholesale resources, operative
resources, obsolete resources, recoverable resources, recovered resources and revalorised resources. We define materials as raw resources and products as produced
resources.
7.2 Literature
7.2.1 Materials as a Service
This research on materials as a service has been influenced by two main concepts:
Material Matters (Rau and Oberhuber 2016); and Chemical Looping (Stoughton
and Votta 2003). Materials Matter is the title of a book by Thomas Rau and Sabine
Oberhuber capturing their vision that it is service, not ownership, the answer to
facilitate an unlimited use of materials and the elimination of waste in the construction
sector (Rau and Oberhuber 2016). To enable this shift, they have proposed an online
registry of material passports, which allows to know where materials are located,
and preserve and reuse materials while saving costs. With this information, obsolete
buildings become a mine of materials.
Research on chemical leasing (Stoughton and Votta 2003), referring to the selling
of the function performed by a chemical, is also related to offering materials as a
service. However, this work has mainly focussed on effective use of chemicals for
cleaning and coating purpose in manufacturing (e.g. charging customers by m2 of
coated surface rather than Kg of paint). Hence, it does not address the proposed
vision to manage material resources throughout the entire supply chain.
7.2.2 Ownership and Business Models
Ownership is the state or fact of exclusive rights and control over property including
objects such materials and products, and land, real estate and intellectual property. In traditional business models, the property of objects and the rights over
them are exchanged as a result of financial transactions between sellers and buyers.
Consumers, for example, buy goods from producers or retailers and as a result own
new products. Use and result oriented product-service systems are business models