Project Description

Raw Material Equivalents - Eurostat

Funded by

Projectpartner

Eurostat

Sustainable Solutions Germany (SSG), Karlsuniversität Prag, Environment Center (CUEC)

Background

It was the objective of the project to improve the current European material flow indicator "Domestic Material Consumption" (DMC) by overcoming the asymmetry of measuring at the one hand the mass of domestic extraction of raw materials from the environment at the point of extraction, but on the other to measure the weight of material which is imported or exported at the time of crossing the border. By expressing all flows in raw material equivalents (RME) it becomes possible to make up a mass balance of domestic uses, imports and exports by a coherent unit of measurement. It is intended to use the indicator "Domestic Raw Material Consumption" (RMC), which is derived from the RME calculation system, as a central indicator of the European Resource Strategy.

This report presents an approach for converting product flows into raw material equivalents (RME). The RME concept takes the perspective of raw materials embodied in products. The RME of a product indicates how much extraction of material was necessary over the whole production chain for manufacturing a specific product, irrespective whether those raw materials where extracted from the domestic or the rest of the world environment. The weight of the consumed raw materials is measured at the point of extraction from the environment.

The estimation of RME is based on the Leontief approach, which is a well-established method for environmental economic analysis. That approach applies Input-Output analysis for assigning direct environmental pressures – measured in physical units – by the individual production activities to the products of final use and of imports.

Download

CONVERSION OF EUROPEAN PRODUCT FLOWS INTO RAW MATERIAL EQUIVALENTS, Final Report, May 2012 (pdf 1.8 MB)

The following results of this project are available as a download on Eurostat's website:

• Aggregates for RMI, RMC, IMPRME, and EXPRME for EU
• Detailed data 7 categories of final use, 166 product groups and 52 material categories
• Annual EU-27 RME coefficients for imports and exports by 166 product groups and 52 material categories

First results of this project are published here (Karl Schoer, Jan Weinzettel, Jan Kovanda, Jürgen Giegrich, and Christoph Lauwigi. Raw Material Consumption of the European Union  – Concept, Calculation Method, and Results. Environmental Science & Technology 2012 46 (16), 8903-8909)

Duration

till December 2011

Contact

Jürgen Giegrich; juergen.giegrich@ifeu.de; 06221/4767-21