Becoming less material intensive

Progress toward environmentally sustainable industrial economies clearly will require reducing the volume of the hidden material flows that precede industrial processes -- the front end of the industrial materials cycle -- rather than just cleaning up the wastes that result from actual production. This has important implications for environmental policies. For example, it makes the benefits of recycling quite clear. Every ton of iron recycled not only replaces a ton that would have been mined but also avoids the creation of several tons of mine tailings or overburden, as well as ore-processing wastes.

What do industrial economies use?

Primary contributions to the total material requirements of selected economies, 1991

Source: A. Adriaanse et al., Resource Flows: The Material Basis of Industrial Economies, a joint publication of the World Resources Institute (WRI), the Wuppertal Institute, the Netherlands Ministry of Housing, Spatial Planning, and the Environment, and the National Institute for Environmental Studies (WRI, Washington, D.C., 1997), p 12.

Yet not everything can be recycled. Coal or oil, for instance, can be burned only once. Unfortunately, fossil fuels and the hidden material flows associated with them make up a large percentage -- between 26 and 46 percent -- of the total materials used in the most industrialized countries. (See What Do Industrial Economies Use?) This means that reducing fossil fuel use is crucial to reducing the total impact of industrial production, in addition to the other global benefits such a reduction would bring in terms of improved air quality and lower greenhouse gas emissions.

Likewise, more sustainable cultivation methods are essential to stem the significant soil loss associated with modern intensive agricultural systems. Erosion, for example, accounts for 17 percent of the total materials requirement of the United States. This number has come down in recent years largely because the United States instituted a policy—embodied in the Conservation Reserve Program—to curtail agricultural production in erosion-prone areas. The program’s success shows that policies that reduce hidden resource flows like soil loss can significantly reduce the environmental impacts of industrial society [7].

This and other hopeful signs show that it might be possible to transform industrial economies. Over the past two decades, the overall economies of Germany, Japan, the Netherlands, and the United States grew slightly faster than did their use of natural resources. If this modest trend toward decoupling natural resource use and economic activity were to intensify, it might indicate that future economic growth could take place without increasing the already heavy burden these economies place on the planet.

The realization of this goal is still a long way off, however. At present, it takes about 300 kilograms of natural resources, including hidden material flows, to generate US$100 of income. The member countries of the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation and Development (OECD) [8], which collectively represent a large percentage of the world’s industrial base, have set a preliminary target of reducing this ratio by a factor of 10, to 30 kilograms per US$100 income, over the next several decades. Without major progress toward this goal, there seems little prospect for reducing the scale of environmental impacts worldwide, especially as developing nations increase their use of natural resources to expand their economies and improve their lifestyles [9].

References and notes

7. Op. cit. 1, pp. 11, 17.

8. The member countries of the OECD include: Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Iceland, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

9. Op. cit. 1, p. 2.