trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

3.2. Material FootprintThe natural resource consumption of the decent reference minimum budgets was calculated as materialfootprint (see Lettenmeier et al., 2009). The material footprint is based on the MIPS concept that hasproved to function as a holistic, useful, reliable and understandable measure for natural resourceconsumption, thus serving also as a central indicator for ecological sustainability (e.g. Schmidt-Bleek,2003; 2009; Rohn et al., 2010). The method considers the whole life cycle of products and activities andincludes direct resource use (used extraction) as well as indirect resource use (unused extraction, seeGliljum et al., 2009; Aachener Stiftung, 2010). In this paper, the resource consumption is given in massunits of TMR (total material requirement, i.e. the sum of abiotic and biotic resource consumption plusthe top soil erosion in agriculture and forestry, see Ritthoff et al., 2002).The calculation of the natural resource consumption of the decent minimum reference budgets wasdone on the basis of the yearly consumption of the households defined. Food was integrated on a twoweeks’ diet basis defined by the consumers (see section 4.1). Household objects and appliances werecalculated on a stock basis including service life estimations, both defined by the consumer panel.Material footprint calculation is done by multiplying the direct resource consumption or other input(e.g. electricity or transportation) with a material intensity factor specific for each input (see Lettenmeieret al., 2009). Most of the material intensity factors used for calculation the material footprints weretaken from Kotakorpi et al. (2008), Lähteenoja et al. (2006) and Lettenmeier et al. (2009). In addition,some coefficients, e.g. for health care and hairdressing, were calculated in this study. In some cases (e.g.daily mobility by public transport) the decent minimum reference budgets were not sufficient forcalculating resource consumption. In these cases, statistics and literature-based estimations were used,e.g. data from the National Travel Survey (WSP LT Consultants, 2006) to estimate transport distances.4. Results: The material footprint of the decent minimum referencebudgetsThe material footprint of all decent minimum reference budgets is appr. 20 tonnes per person in a year(Figure 1). The family has the highest material footprint per person (23.6 tonnes per year) and thewoman under 45 years of age the lowest (19.8 tonnes per year). Thus, the material footprint of all decentminimum reference budgets is roughly half of the one of an average Finn according to Kotakorpi et al.(2008).207