Material Flow Accounting: Measuring Global Material Use for Sustainable Development

Abstract

The growing extraction of natural resources and the waste and emissions resulting from their use are directly or indirectly responsible for humanity approaching or even surpassing critical planetary boundaries. A sound knowledge base of society's metabolism, i.e., the physical exchange processes between society and its natural environment and the production and consumption processes involved, is essential to develop strategies for more sustainable resource use. Economy-wide material flow accounting (MFA) is a framework that provides consistent compilations of the material inputs to national economies, changes in material stocks within the economic system, and material outputs to other economies and the environment. We present the conceptual foundations of MFA and derived indicators and review the current state of knowledge of global patterns and trends of extraction, trade, and use of materials. We discuss the relation of material use and economic development and the decoupling of material use from economic growth in the context of sustainable resource use policies.

Measuring Progress towards a Circular Economy: A Monitoring Framework for Economy‐wide Material Loop Closing in the EU28

“…In order to be able to capture displacement effects related to imports and exports, we include a consumption-based indicator in the framework. For this purpose, Eurostat (2017a) provides the indicator raw material consumption (RMC), which is similar to the material footprint (Wiedmann et al 2015) and measures global material use associated with domestic final consumption (Krausmann et al 2017a). The final pair of scale indicators takes the flow of secondary materials into account, which is not presented in conventional ew-MFA indicators: On the input side, the indicator PM measures the sum total of DMC plus the input of secondary materials, and on the output side, IntOut measures wastes and emissions before materials for recycling and downcycling are diverted.…”

“…Generally, for ew-MFA a systematic assessment of uncertainty is in its infancy (Patrício et al 2015;Laner et al 2014). It has been shown that material flow accounts using different sources and estimation procedures typically differ in their results for global DE by approximately 5% to 20% Krausmann et al 2017a;Fischer-Kowalski et al 2011). For waste statistics, harmonization of data reporting across countries is a major challenge, and data quality differs across EU28 countries (Tisserant et al 2017;Nicolli et al 2012).…”

“…To achieve a more sustainable economy, it is insufficient to only increase recycling and focus on (partial) improvements in the degree of circularity (Cullen 2017;Zink and Geyer 2017), but it is essential to also achieve absolute reductions in resource extraction and consumption, that is, to downsize the socioeconomic metabolism (Akenji et al 2016). This has implications for the assessment of CE strategies and monitoring tools needed to measure both the degree of loop closing and the overall in-and outflows of societies' metabolism (Krausmann et al 2017a).…”

Estimating the human appropriation of land in Brazil by means of an Input–Output Economic Model and Ecological Footprint analysis

“…In a study that compared the direct material input per unit of GDP between 1975 and 1995 among different countries, Brazil and Venezuela were the only countries that exhibited an upward trend (Amann et al, 2002). With the exception of Saudi Arabia, Brazil is the country that has reduced its energy intensity the least between 1990 and 2005, as compared to other G20 member states (Abramovay, 2010a).…”

Material flow analysis and material use efficiency of Brazil's mortar and concrete supply chain

“…Unused extraction and quarry waste due to mining and quarrying activities are considered to have potential environmental impacts (Krausmann, Schandl, Eisenmenger, Giljum, & Jackson, 2017;Torres, Brandt, Lear, & Liu, 2017) and generate local anthropogenic disturbance, especial for construction minerals (Yoshida, Fishman, Okuoka, & Tanikawa, 2017). Nevertheless, data are fairly limited (Eurostat, 2018;Fisher-Kowalski, Krausmann, Giljum, & Lutter, 2011), with only a few MFA inventories even partially considering these type of flows (Kapur et al, 2009;Low, 2005).…”