Resource use matters, but material footprints are a poor way to measure it

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.1

Note that the “material footprint” can differ from “domestic material consumption” as it attempts to adjust for traded goods, capturing total consumption within an economy.

Some readers may not be familiar with this metric, but it has gained increasing popularity in environmental discussions and international policy. It’s included as a key metric in the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals, which is why we have charts on it in our SDG Tracker. This metric is tracked in per capita terms and is shown in the chart below.

It is also used in the planetary pressures index by the UN Development Programme, and you’ll find many reports on it by the OECD, European agencies, and others.2

However, for reasons I’ll explain in this article, I don’t find this metric helpful in understanding the sustainability of resource use or its environmental impacts. I fear that rather than helping us tackle some of our biggest environmental and resource challenges, it obscures our understanding and takes our focus away from the most pressing problems.