The proposed IMPRS-SusMet will address and answer fundamental questions in the emerging field of Sustainable Metallurgy. Metallurgy is one of the core foundations of modern society and has provided humankind since more than five millennia, the beginning of the bronze age, with materials, tools and the associated progress. In the past, research in metallurgy was mainly directed towards inventing new alloys, advancing mechanical properties through microstructure adjustment and reducing costs. The huge annual production of nowadays about 2 billion tons of metallic materials is not only an engineering success story but has also become the biggest single industrial environmental burden of our generation. The present grand societal challenges in the context of sustainability, energy, transportation, health and pollution therefore require fundamental and disruptive innovations in the field of metallurgy. Key topics that need to be addressed in this context are (i) primary synthesis, which is e.g. for steels one of the largest global sources of greenhouse gas emissions, (ii) secondary synthesis (recycling), (iii) increasing operation and service lifetimes and related to this (iv) prevention and reduction of environmental induced degradation (e.g. corrosion). These challenges do not only encompass mass produced materials such as steels and aluminium but also scarce ones such as copper and lithium as well as cobalt and rare earth elements.
