Nation's material flow: From the whole economy to final consumption—the case of Israel

Abstract

Global demands for materials have led to resource depletion, ecosystem degradation, pollution, and climate change. Material flow analysis (MFA) is an established tool examining reliance on natural resources and related environmental pressure. The analysis presented in this paper advances a nation's MFA—from overall economy to final consumption. It considers some acknowledged gaps in the MFA literature including: (a) The need to relate nations' use of materials with consequent environmental impacts; (b) The need to analyze nations' domestic and overseas material sources and waste sinks; (c) The need to allocate the “economy wide” scale materials used and generated waste to the final consumption categories of households. Though applicable globally, the study concentrates on Israel. It revealed that the Israeli economy's annual total material consumption is approximately 2.5 billion tons from both domestic extractions and physical import. This flow of materials results in 937 million tons of domestic (domestic process output) and overseas (imported process output) wastes. Eight-six percent of the materials and 94% of the wastes of the studied economy material flows are found to be related to households' demand for electricity, transportation, food, and consumables. The suggested framework can support environmental decision-makers in developing strategies to reduce environmental impacts.