Nation's material flow: From the whole economy to final consumption—the case of Israel

Zeev Stossel and Meidad Kissinger

Journal of Industrial Ecology, 2025, vol. 29, issue 1, 298-310

Abstract: Global demands for materials have led to resource depletion, ecosystem degradation, pollution, and climate change. Material flow analysis (MFA) is an established tool examining reliance on natural resources and related environmental pressure. The analysis presented in this paper advances a nation's MFA—from overall economy to final consumption. It considers some acknowledged gaps in the MFA literature including: (a) The need to relate nations' use of materials with consequent environmental impacts; (b) The need to analyze nations' domestic and overseas material sources and waste sinks; (c) The need to allocate the “economy wide” scale materials used and generated waste to the final consumption categories of households. Though applicable globally, the study concentrates on Israel. It revealed that the Israeli economy's annual total material consumption is approximately 2.5 billion tons from both domestic extractions and physical import. This flow of materials results in 937 million tons of domestic (domestic process output) and overseas (imported process output) wastes. Eight‐six percent of the materials and 94% of the wastes of the studied economy material flows are found to be related to households' demand for electricity, transportation, food, and consumables. The suggested framework can support environmental decision‐makers in developing strategies to reduce environmental impacts.

Date: 2025
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1111/jiec.13590

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bla:inecol:v:29:y:2025:i:1:p:298-310

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.blackwell ... bs.asp?ref=1088-1980

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Industrial Ecology is currently edited by Reid Lifset

More articles in Journal of Industrial Ecology from Yale University
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Wiley Content Delivery ().