SusMax

In fall 2025, SusMax, a new Max Planck network for Sustainable Materials took off. By joining together researchers from a range of institutes and projects, SusMax is dedicated to the creation of new bio-based materials, the development of low-energy production methods and to rethinking materials using circular design. We encourage or our researchers to think big and to develop ideas with real-world impact.

The Network

The network comprises six institutes: MPI of Colloids and Interfaces (Potsdam), MPI for Sustainable Materials (Düsseldorf), Fritz Haber Institute of the Max Planck Society (Berlin), MPI for Polymer Research (Mainz), MPI for Dynamics of Complex Technical Systems (Magdeburg), and MPI of Geoanthropology (Jena).

The individual projects from an even wider set of MPIs reflect the range of approaches that can be taken to address the issue of sustainability in the design of materials: sustainable resources, sustainable energy consumption, and closing material cycles.

In fact, materials science has been an important cluster within the MPS for decades. The oldest institutes in the cluster date back to the German Empire and the Kasier Wilhelm Society (such as KWI für Eisenforschung, founded in 1917, since 2024 MPI for Sustainable Materials). With SusMax, this long-standing network is now being adapted to new challenges.

New Materials and Geoanthropology

The MPI of Geoanthropology is the only non-technical institute in the network. However, the perspective of geoanthropology has been part of the network since the SusMax initiative was projected in 2020. This follows the conviction that the scientific design of materials provides a key approach to both analyzing and solving anthropocene problems.

Materials are both central stages and central levers of anthropocene dynamics. In fact, artificial, scientifically and industrially produced matter are central drivers of the dynamics of the Anthropocene, whether as semiconductors, artificial fertilizers, plastics, etc. Virtually no significant process within the global technosphere came into existence without artificially produced materials. To date, unsustainable forms of extractivism, fossil fuel regimes, and geopolitically and ethically problematic production chains form the material core of the global economy, science, and technology.

Conversely, materials that follow principles of sustainability in ecological, economic, and socio-political terms are one of the most important keys to sustainable structures for energy production, mobility, agriculture, healthcare, and securing prosperity.

There will be no sustainable energy transition, mobility transition, or agricultural transition without a transformation of chemistry.

The Bigger Picture: Holistic and Grounded

Perspectives that are both as chemically detailed and as holistic as possible are central for the network on all levels. Concrete materials science always operates with a wide set of scales, technical structures, and systemic frameworks.

More levels come into view when the effects of artificial materials on political, economic, ecological, and ultimately Earth system processes are taken into account. In fact, it is the chemical space on the macro level of planetary effects that defines the need for chemical innovation at the micro level. 

On the one hand, the perspective of geoanthropology will provide this framework to the network. On the other hand, the specific research projects in the network also provide precisely the specific human-Earth interactions to which an anthropology of the transition from the fossil to the post-fossil age must refer.