Abstract
Policy has so far not taken full advantage of the tools offered by the “material flows” school of thought. Resource Productivity (RP) is amongst the normative concepts currently popular among policy makers the nearest one to Material Input Per Service unit (MIPS). However, the RP concept falls substantially short of the MIPS idea, as it puts resource use in relation to the monetary value of production, while MIPS makes reference to services actually delivered by the products. Moreover, the indicator currently used by the European Commission for monitoring RP lacks in life-cycle perspective, which is essential in the MIPS concept. The present paper illustrates, by using Italian case evidence, some of the current RP indicator shortcomings and it discusses a possible alternative, by introducing the life-cycle perspective. In Italy, RP has grown faster than both energy and labour productivity since 1980. This apparently shows that Italy is moving in the right direction. However, a deeper and more extensive analysis regarding the country’s natural resource requirements is necessary before a conclusion can be drawn about the sustainability of the Italian socio-economic process. Therefore, on the one hand we disaggregate material consumption (i.e., the denominator of RP) into its components; on the other hand we extend the analysis to overall material requirements, including indirect material flows associated with international trade. These analyses, although limited to used materials (i.e., to resource requirements in Raw Material Equivalents), demonstrate that the Italian success in increasing RP is largely due to the transferring abroad of material flows and ecological burden.
Highlights
Policy has so far not taken full advantage of the tools offered by the “material flows” school of thought
On the one hand we disaggregate material consumption into its components; on the other hand we extend the analysis to overall material requirements, including indirect material flows associated with international trade
One of the main concepts in this approach is Material Input per Service unit (MIPS), which connects the social benefits deriving from products used and the extraction of materials required in order to realise the products [1]
Summary
The dematerialisation approach, is normative in its very nature, as it is intended to guide action aimed at giving a structural answer to the ecological crisis This structural solution is based on acknowledging the deep connection between the two ends of the stream of the materials flowing through the socio-economic process. As a matter of fact, faintly and ambiguously related to service units Another dematerialization school tenet is that, in order to evaluate a product’s sustainability, it is always necessary to consider all the materials used during the whole production process chain, and not just at the final product weight. B does in its place [3]
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