Sustainable development: A challenge for materials technology.

Sustainable development requires ongoing improvement of the environmental efficiency: the efficiency by which resources are being used to fulfill peoples justified needs. The growth of world population, the justified desire for growth of welfare per capita in developing nations, moderate growth in the OECD world, the (limited) availability of environmental resources require dramatic improvements of the environmental efficiency in the coming decades. Dematerialization can be looked upon as a strategy in a process of concurrent changes for sustainability. This process of change is charactarized by the dimensions like: the targeted efficiency improvement, the complexity of a product system, intertwinement of culture, structure and technology. Together they determine other dimensions of change: its intensity and therewith the time required for change. Changes on the short (< 5 y) and medium term (5-10 y) are initiated. For the long term fundamental dematerialization of the whole of means to fulfill needs require breakthroughs in technology which have to be initiated now to garantee their availability in time over 2 to 4 decades. To design an innovation process for breakthroughs on the long term (> 20 y) an interministerial research program ''Sustainable Technology Development'' has been set up. Some tentative conclusions are available.