Corrosion

In tomorrow's world there will be more attention paid to the conservation of materials and energy. Energy is often a significant input in the production of materials. A greater realisation of the degradation mechanisms (and particularly corrosion) must be achieved in that corrosion is ‘an insidious consumer of our stocks of raw materials, a squanderer of our productive capacity and a dissipator of the fruits of our labours’. In real terms it costs about 4 per cent of the GNP of the UK, USA, or Japan and this is wasted ‘labour’. Another way of looking at these figures is to remember that a third of all the steel produced in the UK in one year goes to back to rust within the year.