Claims to Sustainability Through the Lens of a Footprint Indicator : A Geographic and Structural Decomposition Analysis of the Material Footprint for China, the USA, and the Eu-27

Strategies for absolute reductions of resource use are required to address the multiple environmental crisis. We herein investigate, what the material footprint indicator (MF), used to monitor progress towards UN Sustainable Development Goals 8 and 12, shows but also hides about material flows domestically and globally. We geographically and structurally decompose the MF of China, the European Union (EU-27), and the United States of America (USA), between 1997 and 2017. We distinguish four footprint fractions based on either domestic or international extraction or processing, as well as four structural factors. We find that China’s strong MF growth almost entirely occurred domestically, whereas MF growth in the EU-27 and the USA occurred due to imported inefficiencies of international supply chains. Reduced material intensity leads to resource savings only if not outweighed by growing final demand and imported inefficiency, which only occurred for the USA. The MF hides extractivist export-orientation, as domestic extraction for exports is allocated to the consuming countries. Nevertheless, insights into the interlinkages in the global economy available through the MF should be used more systematically to identify critical sectors and industries across countries with highest potentials for absolute reductions in material use within and across supply chains