Material Measurement Units for a Circular Economy: Foundations through a Review

Abstract

Long-term availability of minerals and industrial materials is a necessary condition for sustainable development as they are the constituents of any manufacturing product. In particular, technologies with increasing demand such as GPUs and photovoltaic panels are made of critical raw materials. To enhance the efficiency of material management, in this paper we make three main contributions: first, we identify in the literature an emerging computer-vision-enabled material monitoring technology which we call Material Measurement Unit (MMU); second, we provide a survey of works relevant to the development of MMUs; third, we describe a material stock monitoring sensor network deploying multiple MMUs.