Economy‐wide material system analysis: Mapping material flows through the economy

Abstract

This article proposes a new approach for mapping material flows through the economy referred to as economy-wide material system analysis (EW-MSA). EW-MSA monitors material flows along production chains, connects manufacturing and use of various products with related emission flows, and shows how waste is recycled. The quantification of material flows in EW-MSA is carried out by unambiguously defined EW-MSA indicators. The data on EW-MSA indicators are organized in an EW-MSA database while the results of EW-MSA can be clearly presented with Sankey flow charts. The proposed method was tested using the Czech Republic as a case study. It shows that the Czech Republic is an open economy, as more manufactured products are exported than used domestically. The total physical stock of materials in the economy is continuously growing and only about 7% of total material input into manufacturing is composed of secondary materials. Manufacturing of motor vehicles and transport equipment is highly dependent on imported materials and a significant amount of waste from motor vehicles' manufacture and use is exported instead of being recycled and returned to the manufacturing process. Further development and use of EW-MSA should go hand in hand with the development of needed data sources: Only a fraction of data was directly accessible in the official statistics while the rest had to be modeled with the use of other data and various coefficients. This burdened the results with some uncertainties. K E Y W O R D Seconomy-wide material flow analysis (EW-MFA), economy-wide material system analysis (EW-MSA), industrial ecology, product groups, secondary materials INTRODUCTIONAs shown by Krausman et al. (2009Krausman et al. ( , 2018, there has been an unprecedented increase in global resource use, emissions, and waste flows in the 20th and 21th centuries. It was calculated that resource use increased to 89 Gt per year between 1900 and 2015, which represented a growth by a factor of 12. Similarly, emissions and waste flows increased up to 58 Gt per year over the same period-a growth by a factor of 8. These immense resource and emission flows have increasingly contributed to various global environmental problems such as eutrophication, acidification, biodiversity loss,

Supply Chain Factors Contributing to Improved Material Flow Indicators but Increased Carbon Footprint

“…However, consuming natural resources at the current pace is unsustainable, and the need to reduce resource consumption through more efficient use has become increasingly apparent . The state of material utilization in a particular country, including inflow, outflow, and cyclical use, has been tracked with economy-wide material flow accounting (EW-MFA). − Raw material consumption and material footprint (MF), , two consumption-based indicators, have also been used to estimate the direct and indirect material use of a country through international trade. For instance, the countries with the largest per capita material footprints are Australia, Japan, and the United States, each of which exceeded 25 t/cap/year as of 2008 .…”