Industrial economies are becoming more efficient in their use of materials, but waste generation continues to increase.

Despite strong economic growth in all countries studied, resource inputs and waste outputs between 1975 and 1996 rose relatively little, on a per capita basis, and fell dramatically when measured against units of economic output. Even as decoupling between economic growth and resource throughput occurred on a per capita and per unit GDP basis, however, overall resource use and waste flows into the environment continued to grow. We found no evidence of an absolute reduction in resource throughput.

One half to three quarters of annual resource inputs to industrial economies are returned to the environment as wastes within a year.

Material outputs to the environment from economic activity in the five study countries range from 11 metric tons per person per year in Japan to 25 metric tons per person per year in the United States. When “hidden flows “are included - flows which do not enter the economy, such as soil erosion, mining overburden, and earth moved during construction - total annual material outputs to the environment range from 21 metric tons per person in Japan to 86 metric tons per person in the United States.

Outputs of some hazardous materials have been regulated and successfully reduced or stabilized but outputs of many potentially harmful materials continue to increase.

Examples of successes include the reduction or stabilization of emissions to air of sulfur compounds and lead from gasoline, phosphorus in detergents, and some heavy metals. Quantities of municipal solid wastes sent to landfills have also stabilized or declined in all countries studied. Many other hazardous, or potentially hazardous, material flows are poorly controlled because they occur at the extraction phase or the use and disposal phases of the material cycle, which are outside the traditional area of regulatory scrutiny. Our estimates indicate that many potentially hazardous flows in the United States increased by 25 to 100 percent between 1975 and 1996.

The extraction and use of fossil energy resources dominate output flows in all industrial countries.

Modern industrial economies are carbon-based economies. Fossil energy consumption is still rising. Carbon dioxide accounts, on average, for more than 80 percent by weight of material outflows from economic activity in the five study countries. The atmosphere is by far the biggest dumping ground for industrial wastes.

Physical accounts are urgently needed, because our knowledge of resource use and waste outputs is surprisingly limited.

Neither traditional monetary accounts nor environmental statistics are an adequate basis for tracking resource flows into and out of the economy. They record only a part of resource inputs, lose sight of some materials in the course of processing, and entirely miss major flows of materials that do not enter the economy at all, such as soil erosion from cultivated fields. On the output side, monetary accounts and environmental statistics record few material flows that are not subject to regulation or classified as wastes requiring treatment. Nor do they differentiate among the many materials that are aggregated in products.