Material flows and footprints

Figure one provides a schematic depiction of the socioeconomic metabolism of Sweden. It depicts the amounts of materials (clustered into four key resource groups—excluding water and air) embodied in the inputs and outputs of highly aggregated industry groups. Due to the level of detail and intricacy of how materials flow through an economy, we are not able to visualise all flows and all sectors. Because the majority of materials flow through just a handful of sectors in an economy, we have limited our visualisation to show these. The left side shows the four resource groups as a result of direct domestic extraction. These are minerals (limestone, copper and lithium, for example), metal ores (iron, cobalt and titanium dioxide, for example), fossil fuels (petroleum, for example) and biomass (food crops and forestry, for example).

We also see on the left the volume of resources entering the provincial economy through imports. These are represented in terms of Raw Material Equivalents (RMEs)—the amount of material extraction needed, anywhere in the world, to produce a traded product. Together, the domestic extraction and the RME of imports comprise the total inputs (raw material input) of a national economy.

Once in the economy, extracted or traded raw materials as well as the traded or domestically produced components, semi-products and products undergo operations that either transform them into end products or make them part of the production process of another end product. Beginning with the extraction, the resources are processed, such as metals from ores, which are manufactured into products in the produce stage. The finished products provide satisfaction to societal needs and wants such as Nutrition, Housing and Mobility, or they are exported. Of these materials entering the national economy every year, the majority are utilised by society as short-lived Products that Flow—reaching their end-of-use typically within a year, such as an apple, food packaging or a standard toothbrush. The end-of-use resources of these products are typically either lost or cycled back into the economy. The remaining materials enter into long-term stock—referred to as Products that Last. These are products such as capital equipment, buildings and infrastructure.

* You may notice that the footprint of Swedish societal needs is given as 276 million tonnes, rather than the 257.5 million tonnes mentioned earlier in the report. This figure is Domestic Material Consumption (DMC): the physical consumption of an economy, which doesn’t distinguish between intermediate demand and final demand for materials. This differs slightly from Raw Material Consumption (RMC), the figure given elsewhere: our modelling approach requires that RMC is used to calculate values for the societal needs, while the indicator framework and overall mass balance are dependent on DMC.