STREAMS: a new method for analysing material flows through society

Abstract For the development of material, product and waste oriented policies, knowledge about the flow, use and disposal of materials through society is necessary. The risks of taking policy measures leading to suboptimum solutions of environmental problems call for an integral survey of material flows through society. However, up to now, integral analyses of physical material flows have been lacking. Problems such as differences in definitions, in subdivisions of flows and in reference years make it difficult to relate data from different sources to obtain an overall view. In this article, STREAMS, a new method to calculate physical material flows through society, is proposed. The method is based on the so-called supply and use tables, which describe a country’s economy in terms of supply and use of materials, products and services by industries, service sectors and consumers. In our approach, materials and products are tracked on their way from extraction of raw materials to the final consumption of products and beyond, into the stage of waste. The method has the advantage of deriving almost all data from one source. In this article the method is described. In a separate study, the method is applied to obtain an integral survey of the flow of plastics through The Netherlands, showing that the method can be used to assess the final materials consumption on a highly detailed level.