Materials have been central to the development of civilization, as they constitute the
backbone of our society and of our technology, as all things are made of materials and all
of them are made by tools mainly made of metals, and especially iron and steel. In modern
language, they have become central to the sustainability of our society. Speaking about or
measuring this relationship, however, is complex. Life Cycle Thinking is an important tool
for doing this, but it was not developed with materials in mind and it focuses only on
that small part of sustainability related to environmental impacts. Economic and societal
issues require other methodologies and all these complementary visions have to be
aggregated in order to report properly on sustainability matters. To advance towards such
a new tool, called the New Metrics, an Initiative called SOVAMAT was launched 10 years ago
and a Community has shaped up, binging together academics from a broad array of hard and
soft disciplines, materials producers from metals to plastics, glass, paper/cardboard,
concrete, carbons, wood, etc., and materials users, including meta-users who work on
ecodesign, for example. The agenda of the Initiative is moving forward, improving existing
methodology, extending it and aggregating various tools towards the final target of the
New Metrics. The SOVAMAT Community meets regularly in annual seminars called Society and
Materials or SAM. This paper explains the questions addressed by the Initiative and some
of its early successes.