Abstract
Due to the global fragmentation of supply and use chains, final consumption and the production of goods and services are often spatially disconnected. A country in which a large share of material and energy use is dedicated to the production of exports may seem to consume more material than a country that imports material-intensive products. Material flow accounting (MFA) is a well-established tool within environmental accounting, and the indicators it provides are increasingly used to inform policy-making on sustainability issues. Growing trade volumes and the deeper integration of all economies into global markets have posed a new challenge to MFA: how can we expand the scope of the accounts from a production-based perspective to one that includes consumption? In this chapter, we discuss the recent additions to the MFA method that seek to allocate material use to those economies where final consumption occurs rather than to those economies producing for export. These approaches are illustrated with a case study of the Austrian economy. This case study compares material use in Austria under production- and consumption-based approaches.
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Notes
- 1.
DMC = Domestic extraction (DE) + imports − exports.
- 2.
Full coverage may be hindered by truncation decisions, which have to be made in the tracing of any life cycle. Allocation decisions can potentially lead to double-counting and must be made whenever the same production process produces more than one good. Allocation can be based on different aspects of the products (economic value, mass/energy, material input avoided by coupled (instead of single-product) production). The results of these different allocation approaches can be completely opposite, so the decision of which procedure to use has a major impact on the results.
- 3.
The category of other products had to be introduced because some of the product groups in the IO data are composed of more than one type of the four basic materials, and a dominant material cannot be unambiguously identified.
- 4.
Following MFA conventions, we accounted for metal DE as the gross ore (see Eurostat 2001).
- 5.
For the sake of clarity, we will mainly describe LCA in terms of a product. However, LCA may also be applied to well-defined processes, services or even organizations.
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Schaffartzik, A., Eisenmenger, N., Wiedenhofer, D. (2016). Boundary Issues: Calculating National Material Use for a Globalized World. In: Haberl, H., Fischer-Kowalski, M., Krausmann, F., Winiwarter, V. (eds) Social Ecology. Human-Environment Interactions, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33326-7_10
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