5. Sustainable development and innovation

Ceramics are often criticized for being insufficiently environmentally friendly due to their low recyclability, energy-intensive manufacturing, and permanent consumption of natural resources. This criticism needs to be qualified. The durability of ceramics, an essential quality, largely offsets these disadvantages when considering the life cycle per unit of use rather than per unit of mass. In fact, with the exception of a small fraction that will have been broken, ceramic products are generally removed from circulation not because they are inefficient or unusable, but because they are considered outdated or mismatched, or worse, because they are subject to a decision to demolish the building in which they were incorporated.