A Systemic and Systematic Approach to the Development of a Policy Mix for Material Resource Efficiency

Tomas Ekvall,Aleksander Śniegocki,Martin Hirschnitz-Garbers,Fabio Eboli

doi:10.3390/su8040373

Abstract

Increasing material use efficiency is important to mitigate future supply risks and minimize environmental impacts associated with the production of the materials. The policy mix presented in this paper aims to contribute to reducing the use of virgin metals in the EU by 80% by 2050 without significant shifting of burdens to other material resources, environmental impacts, or parts of the world. We used a heuristic framework and a systems perspective for designing the policy mix that combines primary instruments designed to increase material efficiency, recycling and substitution of materials (a materials tax, the extended producer responsibility, technical regulations, and environmental taxes) and supportive instruments aimed to reduce barriers to implementing the primary instruments and to contribute towards the policy objectives (e.g., research and development support, and advanced recycling centers). Furthermore, instruments were designed so as to increase political feasibility: e.g., taxes were gradually increased as part of a green fiscal reform, and border-tax adjustments were introduced to reduce impacts on competitiveness. However, even in such a policy mix design ongoing ex-ante assessments indicate that the policy mix will be politically difficult to implement—and also fall short of achieving the 80% reduction target. Nonetheless, we suggest combining primary and supportive instruments into coherent and dynamic policy mixes as a promising step towards system reconfigurations for sustainability.

Highlights

Global consumption of material resources has seen marked increases in the last century, in particular since the 1950s [1,2,3,4]
This encompasses the following stages: (1) Defining longer-term objectives and setting short- to medium-term, more concrete, targets for the respective policy areas; (2) Elaborating a theoretical causal model for problem solving in the policy areas (What is the problem situation? What are contributing drivers? What does impede changes?); (3) Selecting, based on heuristics and expert guessing, promising instruments from known potentially relevant policy instruments contributing to problem solving to form an initial policy mix; (4) Undertaking ex-ante assessments of the initial policy mix as to its potential effectiveness and impacts
This usually entails comprehensive scientific analyzes, which enable substantiated decision-making as to whether or not to include the instrument analyzed into the mix; (5) Adding, if the initial mix was found sub-optimal against the set objectives and targets, further instruments to the mix or revising existing instruments and re-running the assessment (repetition of Stages (4) and (5)) to finalize the policy mix; and

Summary

Introduction

Global consumption of material resources has seen marked increases in the last century, in particular since the 1950s [1,2,3,4]. The use of resources and, in particular, the production of bulk materials (steel, aluminum, cement, polymers, and paper) is responsible for a significant share of the energy demand and greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions of human society [5,6] Transforming these materials into consumption goods, infrastructure, and housing generates significant environmental impacts. Rising global population and affluence levels, ever more widespread adoption of westernized lifestyles, and production and consumption patterns will contribute to future increases in resource consumption, which is expected to reach approximately 140 billion tons of minerals, ores, fossil energy carriers, and biomass by 2050 [10], more than doubling from the 68 billion tons reported for 2009 [1] Such resource use and associated environmental impacts contribute to (further) transgressing existing planetary boundaries [11]. Human activities are expected to require two planet Earths around 2030 [12] and fossil-fuel-dominated energy use will increase by almost 80% by 2050 [13]

Objectives

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion