Raw materials consumption (i59)

Definition: raw material consumption (RMC), also referred to as the material footprint, represents the global demand for the extraction of materials induced by consumption of goods and services within a geographical reference area (here Belgium). Data for material footprints comes from material flow accounts, which model the flows of natural resources from the environment into the economy. They include domestic extraction of materials measured in tonnes of gross material (for example, gross ore or gross harvest) as well as imports and exports measured by estimates of the raw material equivalents of the products traded (domestic and abroad extraction required to produce the traded products). RMC shows thus the amount of extraction needed to produce the goods demanded by final users in the geographical reference area, irrespective of where in the world the material extraction took place (Eurostat, 2018). The materials considered are biomass, metal ores, non-metallic minerals and fossil fuels.