#3 1,050 Bicycles? Consumption at a Glance

A girl with bikes at Amsterdam Central Station. Original photo

By some estimates, global material extraction has grown by more than 90% since 1980, with global consumption comfortably reaching over 70 billion tonnes in 2010 (Giljum et al., 2014: 319)

I shared this fact with a fellow blogger. Her reply: “what even does that mean.” She makes a good point. What even is 70 billion tonnes of material? It sounds like a lot – it is a lot, but to really bring the point home, lets put things into perspective. 

In my last post, I indicated that a popular method of quantifying the volume of consumption in an economy is through a MFA. I will not be doing the flow accounting myself, instead I will be making use of data compiled by Giljum et al., which is publicly accessible here. I have however made made my own manipulation of the data available here. 

The main indicator that I am interested in is Domestic Material Consumption (DMC). EUROSTAT defines DMC as the part of material extraction that is directly used by an economy, where ‘material extraction’ refers to both materials extracted domestically and materials traded (i.e. all physical imports minus all physical exports). DMC is often used in policy recommendation, such as in the “Roadmap to a Resource Efficient Europe” (2011), where it functioned as the headline indicator. 

There are several faults associated with this indicator. First, it ignores important environmental measures like scarcity and environmental impact. And secondly, it doesn’t include hidden flows, which are the physical flows associated with extraction but that ultimately do not enter the economy – they remain ‘unused’ (also known as ecological rucksacks). Think – soil erosion, overburden from mining, discarded material when harvesting timber, or earth moved as a result of construction. 

For now, lets all agree that there’s no such thing as a perfect indicator.

Left: Figure [1] DMC Absolute. Right: Figure [2] DMC/capita

Figure [1] follows the trend in global material consumption, which has steadily increased since 1980. The greater rate of growth in global DMC since 2002 can largely be attributed to the rise of a new group of lower middle-income countries, known as BRICS. In fact, BRICS overtook OECD countries in material consumption around 2004, and collectively consumed nearly 50% of all direct material goods by 2010. This sharp increase in absolute consumption is accompanied by a notable expansion of per capita consumption in BRICS countries [Figure 2]. On a per capita basis, OECD countries are clearly still ahead. The steep decline in per capita DMC in OECDs can be explained by the economic crisis that transpired around 2008-9. 

As promised, I will (hopefully) bring some clarity to these remarkable numbers by using a relatively unremarkable reference: the bicycle. 

Figure [3]: Number of Bikes per capita

For this figure, I have selected two extreme cases of DMC – Sub-Saharan Africa and China. China’s growth in consumption since 2002 has been explosive. In bicycle terms, every Chinese citizen would own the equivalent of 1,700 bicycles in 2010, assuming that all materials introduced in the economy were used to make these bikes. That’s a 467% increase from 1980. In Sub-Saharan Africa, the number of bicycles each citizen would own per annum has remained relatively constant at around 450 bikes. Globally, this figure has increased to around 1,050 bicycles in 2010. To summarize all this bluntly: that’s a lot of bikes. Also important to realize is that not everyone owns the same amount of bicycles. In terms of policy implications, this indicates that a small group of countries play a sizable role in curtailing overconsumption. 

Bonus: Here's a visualisation I made. Have a look and see which countries consumed the greatest amount of materials per capita in 2010 – are you surprised?

Note: I've excluded Kuwait and Qatar, because the extremely high DMC/Capita values skewed the data. Data was unavailable for countries shaded in grey.