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✍️ New article! What do a tonne of potatoes, gravel, coal, and copper have in common? Not much, except that they all weigh the same, and are treated exactly the same in a metric called the “material footprint”.
The material footprint sums up the weight of all the resources used within an economy. So if a country’s material footprint is 60 million tonnes, it extracts 60 million tonnes of “stuff” per year.
This includes both non-renewable resources like metals and fossil fuels, and “renewable” ones like crops and wood.
The scarcity or environmental impact of different resources is not considered, so every kilogram of stuff is considered just as important as every kilogram of something else.
In the chart you can see the material footprint of the European Union.
Some readers may not be familiar with this metric, but it has gained increasing popularity in environmental discussions and international policy. For example, it’s included as a key metric in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.
However, for reasons we explain in our new article, this metric isn't particularly helpful in understanding the sustainability of resource use or its environmental impacts.
Rather than helping us tackle some of our biggest environmental and resource challenges, it can obscure our understanding and take our focus away from the most pressing problems.
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