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.