What is a sustainable material?

Answer 1

A sustainable material, or a sustainable resource is something whose production is supported indefinitely by nature.It is not always the same as a renewable resource.

For example, cashmere wool is produced by goats and is a renewable resource. We can always get more as it grows on goats. But it is not sustainable. Goats have a devastating impact on the environment, eating vegetation right down to its roots and killing the plant, and their hard hooves tear up the topsoil. China produces a lot of cashmere but the cashmere region is beginning to look like the dust bowls of the US in the 1930s. As the goat's feed dies away, and the topsoil blows away, there will no arable land left for anything.

(See the link below to a Seattle Times report.)

Forested timber is perhaps a sustainable resource, if timber can be planted and grown as quickly as it is cut down to make wooden chopsticks and newspaper. Growing the same kind of trees over and over on the same bit of often substandard soil doesn't lead to a good ecology either, and foresters may have to load it up with fertilizer and pesticides.

Wind power and solar power, on the other hand, are renewable and sustainable resources. (If the great banks of windmills don't slow down the wind and lead to other problems!)