About The Earth's Resources

What is a Resource?
In human terms, a resource is anything we get from the environment (the Earth's life-support systems) to meet our needs and desires. However, all forms of life need resources such as food, water, and shelter for survival and good health.

Some resources, such as solar energy, fresh air, wind, fresh surface water, fertile soil, and wild edible plants, are directly available for use by us and other organisms. Other resources such as petroleum (oil), iron, groundwater (water occurring underground), and modern crops, aren't directly avilable. They become useful to us only with some effort and technological ingenuity. Petroleum, for example, was a mysterious fluid until we learned how to find it, extract it, and refine it into gasoline, heating oil, and other products that could be sold at affordable prices. On our short human timescale, we classify material resources as renewable, potentially renewable, and nonrenewable.

What are Renewable Resources?
A renewable resource is a resource that on a human timescale is essentially inexhaustible. Solar energy, for example, is called a renewable resource because it is expected to last at least 6 billion years while the sun completes its life cycle.

What are Potentially Renewable Resources?
A potentially renewable resource can be replenished fairly rapidly (hours to several decades) through natural processes. Examples of such resources include forest trees, grassland grasses, wild animals, fresh lake and stream water, groundwater, fresh air, and fertile soil.

What are Nonrenewable Resources?
Resources that exist in a fixed quantity in the Earth's crust and thus theoretically can be completely used up are called nonrenewable, or exhaustible resources. On a time scale of millions to billions of years, such resources can be renewed by geological processes. However, on a much shorter time scale of hundreds to thousands of years, these resources can be depleted much faster than they are formed.

These exhaustible resources include energy resources (coal, oil, natural gas, uranium), which cannot be recycled; metallic mineral resources (iron, copper, aluminium), which can be recycled; and nonmetallic mineral resources (salt, clay, sand, phosphates), which are usually difficult or too costly to recycle.

What is Recycling?
Recycling involves collecting and reprocessing a resource into new products. For example, glass bottles can be crushed and melted to make new bottles or other glass items.

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