Statistics on the flow of materials from the Basque Country. 2005-2015

One of the characteristics of today’s society is the production and consumption of goods, with the consequent environmental impacts due to the extraction, transformation, use and elimination of finite natural resources. Therefore, the evolution towards an economic model based on sustainable development involves reducing the consumption of materials in economies, especially in developed countries, disassociating the use of natural resources (water, materials and energy) and ecological services (capacity of nature to absorb waste and emissions) from economic growth. This process of reducing the consumption of materials is known as dematerialisation. It can occur both in relative terms, per unit of GDP, (weak dematerialisation), and in absolute terms (strong dematerialisation).To analyse the consumption of materials by an economy and monitor the dematheralisation process, the Material Flow Analysis (AFM) is used. The AFM is a methodology of quantification of the materials (raw materials, semi-invoices and final products) exchanged between the system and the environment. The AFM is based on the concept of social metabolism, which compares economics to a living being: the economy “feeds” on resources and materials, taking advantage of them and extracting their “nutrients”, to later return to the natural environment a waste. A mass balance relates these inputs to the economy (food) with outputs (excretion), the difference being the accumulation of materials in the economy in the form of consumer goods (growth of biomass). Counting the materials that enter and leave the economic system can produce indicators that are easy to obtain and understand, facilitating an overview of the physical dimension of the economy of a territory.Two of the indicators most used in the Analysis of Material Flows are the Total Need for Materials (NTM), which represents the totality of materials that enter the economy, and the Domestic Consumption of Materials (CDM), which gives an idea about the external dependence at the material level of an economy.