The high ‘price’ of dematerialization: A dynamic panel data analysis of material use and economic recession
Graphical abstract
Gross domestic product (GDP) and domestic material consumption (DMC = domestic extraction plus imports minus exports) growth rates in the United States of America (U.S.), Germany, Japan, and Brazil during 1970–2010. Please note the differences in scaling of the y-axis. Data sources: UNEP (2016a), World Bank (2016).
Section snippets
Introduction: economic development and material flows
Global material use has increased from approximately 7 billion tons (Gigatons Gt) in the year 1900 (Krausmann et al., 2009) to approximately 70 Gt in 2010 (Schaffartzik et al., 2014). The extraction and use of these large and growing quantities of resources are related to a broad range of sustainability problems and a decoupling of material use and economic development is considered imperative for sustainable development (UNEP, 2011). It has been shown that, however, significant improvements in
Methods and data
In assessing the role which economic recession plays for material use levels, we require an analytic approach which allows us to study the relationship between these two (and other background) variables. We must assume that the material use levels are prone to feedback over time. This requires a dynamic model that can capture time lags in the material variable, such as, allowing past material use levels to influence current material use levels. “Static” panel techniques, as regularly used for
Results and discussion
Between 1970 and 2010, global material use,3 measured here as DMC, increased by a factor of 2.9, from 23.2 Gigatons (Gt) in 1970 to 68.1 Gt in 2010. The strongest growth during this period occurred in the use of non-metallic minerals for
Conclusions and outlook
Dematerialization, the reduction of absolute levels of material resource consumption, is a prerequisite to tackling some of the most pressing environmental issues of our time and to achieving a sustainability transformation. Using a dynamic panel data model to analyze the relationships between material flow and socio-economic indicators for 150 economies from 1970 to 2010, we found that globally, dematerialization coincided with periods of economic recession or very low growth which occurred
Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the State Scholarship Fund from China Scholarship Council (Grant No. 201306240017), the Austrian Science Fund FWF (Project MISO P27590), and the European Union (FP7-Science in Society-2010-1 Project Environmental Justice Organizations, Liabilities and Trade - EJOLT). The authors wish to thank ICREA Professor Giorgos Kallis and Dr. Beatriz Rodríguez-Labajos at ICTA-UAB as well as Nesen Ertugrul, Gerda Gieselmann-Hoschek, and Bernhard Hammer at Alpen-Adria University.
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