Susmax Worskhop 2026: Sustainable Materials and Geoanthropology 

Berlin. 8-9 September. The SusMax network of the Max Planck Society met for their second annual workshop in the Harnack Haus in Berlin. The inititiave, founded in 2025, is focused on researching “sustainable materials for a circular economy and beyond.”

This year’s workshop brought together researchers from a range of fields for discussions on ongoing projects in material science, ranging from the development of new sustainable materials to methods of recycling and waste management.

The conference also featured invited speakers, including chemist Robert Schlögl, Nobel laureate Ben Faringa, and Benjamin Steininger of the Max Planck Institute of Geoanthropology. Steininger’s talk focused on his project Chemiewende – the transformation of chemical materials and processes. Industrially produced materials (ammunition, fertilizers, fuels, building materials, plastics, antibiotics etc.) are crucial for all dynamics of the Anthropocene. In fact, the comparatively little debated transition towards more sustainable materials will be key to all prominent energy, mobility, or agricultural transitions.

Yet the political circumstances for Chemiewende have shifted, as his talk explained, before our eyes. Sustainability goals and projects are under active attack from political and technological adversaries. This in fact exposes the increased need to get to understand the politics of chemistry and the chemistry of politics through Geoanthropology. 

As the only participating institute from the Max Planck Society’s humanities section, MPI GEA also organized a session focused on sustainability in law. Thomas Schomerus of the Sustainability Faculty at Leuphana Universtiy Lüneburg was invited for a talk titled “Sustainable Products - Chances and Barriers from a Legal Perspective.”

The talk illuminated how regulation can steer the development dynamics of materials and technologies, but also showed that regulators must be informed by insights by material science. At the same time, researchers working on new materials must be aware of the social and legal impacts of their work.

In a subsequent panel discussion with Thomas Schomerus, Silvia Vignolini, speaker of SusMax, Eberhard Bodenschatz, ‘energy officer’ of the MPS, and Benjamin Steininger deepened the debate.

The SusMax workshop once more showed that the most pressing issues of sustainability can only be solved – or indeed even identified – through cooperation between perspectives from the most differing academic backgrounds. The path towards sustainable materials is maybe one of the most complex showcases for the need to think together systematically about chemical, political, and geohistorical processes.