Raw Material Consumption of the European Union – Concept, Calculation Method, and Results

Abstract

This article presents the concept, calculation method, and first results of the "Raw Material Consumption" (RMC) economy-wide material flow indicator for the European Union (EU). The RMC measures the final domestic consumption of products in terms of raw material equivalents (RME), i.e. raw materials used in the complete production chain of consumed products. We employed the hybrid input-output life cycle assessment method to calculate RMC. We first developed a highly disaggregated environmentally extended mixed unit input output table and then applied life cycle inventory data for imported products without appropriate representation of production within the domestic economy. Lastly, we treated capital formation as intermediate consumption. Our results show that services, often considered as a solution for dematerialization, account for a significant part of EU raw material consumption, which emphasizes the need to focus on the full production chains and dematerialization of services. Comparison of the EU's RMC with its domestic extraction shows that the EU is nearly self-sufficient in biomass and nonmetallic minerals but extremely dependent on direct and indirect imports of fossil energy carriers and metal ores. This implies an export of environmental burden related to extraction and primary processing of these materials to the rest of the world. Our results demonstrate that internalizing capital formation has significant influence on the calculated RMC.

The Distribution of Material Footprints in Germany

“…Designing the corresponding policies necessitates data on the amount of biomass, minerals, and fossil fuels used to produce commodities for final consumption and hinges on evidence on how households' material footprints react to incentives, in particular prices. While existing literature provides estimates for countries' material footprints (Muñoz et al, 2009;Schoer et al, 2012;Arto et al, 2012;Bruckner et al, 2012;Wiebe et al, 2012;Kovanda and Weinzettel, 2013;Schaffartzik et al, 2014;Wiedmann et al, 2014;Giljum et al, 2015;Wiedmann et al, 2015;Ivanova et al, 2015;Wenzlik et al, 2015;Giljum et al, 2016) 2 , evidence on the heterogeneity of households' MF within a country is scarce and, furthermore, either focused on exotic materials such as neodymium (Shigetomi et al, 2015(Shigetomi et al, , 2016 or based on very small samples (Kotakorpi et al, 2008;Lettenmeier et al, 2012). 3 This study makes two contributions to a better understanding of households' material footprints.…”

Measuring telecouplings in the global land system: A review and comparative evaluation of land footprint accounting methods

“…Beyond that, there exist further options for hybrid accounting, not yet applied to land footprint calculations. For example, several material footprint studies integrate detailed statistics in mass units into monetary IOTs, thereby creating mixed-unit IOTs (Buyny et al, 2009;Schoer et al, 2012;Schoer et al, 2013).…”

Raw Material Equivalents: The Challenges of Accounting for Sustainability in a Globalized World

“…Because the material flow data is not available in sectoral resolution, assumptions as to the allocation of material flows to economic sectors must be made in constructing the environmental extension. This method, referred to as environmentally extended input-output analysis (EEIOA) and essentially based on Leontief's framework [5,6], is constantly advanced and applied to RMC or material footprints [7][8][9] as well as to other RMC-type indicators on energy [10,11], carbon and greenhouse gas emissions [12][13][14], land (reviewed in [15] and [16]), the Ecological Footprint [17,18], water (reviewed in [19]), changes in biodiversity [20], and labor requirements [21,22] and inequality [23] associated with traded goods and services.…”

“…While disaggregated data may improve the validity of the homogeneity assumption, they cannot solve the problem entirely: In reality, different types of co-production will commonly exist. In developing an approach to calculating the RME of Europe's trade, Schoer and colleagues [7] have pointed out the lack of detail that results from the high aggregation of primary and secondary sectors in many countries' input-output tables.…”

“…National capital accounts can be used to close the IO model for investments and capital depreciation as part of the intermediate use of sectors [67][68][69]. When investments are endogenized in such a manner, the results for RMC-type indicators differ significantly from those of accounts in which investments are treated as final demand, especially for services [7,70].…”