Material Use Indicators for Measuring Resource Productivity and Environmental Impacts

The OECD framework of accounting for material flow and resource productivity and recent experiences in Japan Yuichi Moriguchi Director, Research Center for Material Cycles and Waste Management, National Institute for Environmental Studies, Japan During last one to two decades, Material Flow Analysis, Accounting and Indicators have made good progress both in methodologies and policy-relevant uses, through interactions between international and national activities as well as those between methodological experts and policy users. OECD has played a key role in these interactions. OECD Council Recommendation (CR) on Material Flows (MF) and Resource Productivity (RP) was adopted twice in 2004 and 2008. Follow-up activities including workshops in Berlin, Tokyo and other capitals have led to outcomes such as a set of OECD guidance documents for measuring MF and RP. Japanese fundamental plan for establishing a Sound Material-Cycle Society adopted three economy-wide MF indicators with their numerical targets in 2003. While indicators have shown successful trend toward the targets, new indicators with/without numerical targets were introduced in the second plan revised in 2008, for better understanding and monitoring of material flows and resource productivity. Measuring Material Use and Resource Productivity in Europe Stephan Moll Eurostat In the past, Eurostat has been fostering the methodological harmonisation of measuring material use in Europe (EW-MFA Guide 2001). Since 2007 Eurostat is collecting EW-MFA data (bi-annually). Currently, Eurostat publishes the DMC indicator as a measure for Europe's material use and resource productivity. In future, Eurostat will extend this indicator towards DMC in raw material equivalents (DMCRME) which is more suited to measure material use and resource productivity. Measuring DMI, DMC, TMR and TMC of Germany Helmut Schütz and Mathieu Saurat Wuppertal Institute The presentation provides comparative analysis for the most prominent indicators of material input Direct Material Input (DMI) and Total Material Requirement (TMR), and of material consumption Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) and Total Material Consumption (TMC). Issues address basic definitions, objectives and foundations, as well as practical application, policy relevance and development perspectives. Results for Germany 1991 to 2004 show relative decoupling of material resource use from economic growth but no sign of absolute reduction of total global material requirements. Non-renewable materials make up the bigger part of Germany’s resource use, in particular fossil energy carriers for domestic consumption and domestic construction minerals. Growing indirect resource use for imports is dominated by metals which is to a large extent exported for consumption in the rest of the world. Direct material consumption indicates only a relatively small portion of total global resource requirements for Germany’s domestic consumption. Sensitivity analysis of the indirect flows of imported metals showed high probability of the results for TMR. DMI and DMC of Germany calculated as Raw Material Equivalents Sarka Buyny Federal Statistical Office of Germany Within material flow accounts the indicators known as DMI (Direct Material Input) and DMC (Domestic Material Consumption) are calculated. The main question according these indicators is: how to take into the account the whole material content of imported goods (respectively exported goods). DMI, which includes imported goods in tons, underestimates the real material input of the economy. The Federal Statistical Office of Germany produced a first estimation of DMI and DMC in raw material equivalents (RME). This method tries to integrate the imported goods in form of raw materials directly and indirectly used in the manufacturing and transport process. The basis for the calculation is a hybrid input-output approach, combined with the coefficients of life cycle analysis for those products, which are not produced in Germany at all or which are manufactured abroad under completely different conditions. As an additional part of RME-calculation, raw materials used for the transport of traded goods were estimated. The first results were calculated for imports, exports, DMI, DMC and physical trade balance for time period 2000 – 2007. Accounting for Environmental Impacts of Resource Use Outline of a challenge and recent approaches Stefan Bringezu Wuppertal Institute The decoupling of resource use and environmental impacts at macro level can only be measured if valid methods are available. Starting point is the system definition delineating the resources, materials and products used for which specific impacts are then determined in a life-cycle-wide perspective. For this purpose, bottom-up approaches with selected materials, input-output-approaches, and hybrid approaches can be applied. Single specific impacts of overall resource use (production and consumption) such as global warming potential (GWP) can be accounted with reliable certainty. However, accounting for various other specific impacts is still difficult and bound with uncertainty. The characterization and quantification of important LCA impacts categories is still lacking or based on disputable assumptions (e.g. depletion of resources). The aggregation to single indexes requires additional normative assumptions. Macro approaches with reliable LCA elements seem promising to derive key indicators (e.g. global land use change). Environmental weighting of resource use Ester van der Voet CML The Environmentally weighed Material Consumption (EMC) indicator has been developed for the EU DG Environment, to support their Resource Strategy. This Strategy aims at double decoupling: (1) economic growth from resource use, and (2) resource use from environmental impacts. While mass-based indicators such as DMC and TMC can be used for the former, the EMC is developed for the latter. The idea is to develop multiplyers for materials based on their life-cycle wide environmental impacts. The consumption of those materials weighed by the multiplyers and added to a total then is the EMC. For the material consumption, MFA data can be used – a direct use of production and trade statistics is preferable but at EU level statistics are as yet too incomplete to be meaningful. For the impact multiplyers, LCI data are used from the Ecoinvent database and translated into 11 midpoint impact categories. These in turn have to be aggregated via normalisation and weighting to arrive at one indicator. Both for the LCI data and for the aggregation, various options are available. Harmonisation within the EU is an ongoing process. EMC is presently considered as one indicator in a basket of decoupling indicators, to be compiled by Eurostat on a regular basis in their Datacenter for Natural Resources.