Resource consumption and efficiency in Lithuania

Abstract

Physical growth of society and related environmental burden has gained an attention in the last decade. Despite some improvement in resource productivity was achieved, growing demand resulted in overall increase in resource consumption. Therefore the need to reexamine recent development patterns and to put higher priority to absolute decoupling processes appeared. For this purpose methodology for the industrial metabolism evaluation - material flow analysis (MFA) - was applied in more detailed for Lithuania, a typical country of transition economy. As the analysis showed direct material input (DMI) and domestic material consumption (DMC) were on the growth between 1992 and 2000: DMI increased by 25 % and DMC by 8 %. DMI and DMC were mostly driven by biomass, fossil fuels and construction minerals. Regarding delinking some negative decoupling took place for both DMI and DMC in the beginning of 90s, and only from 1997 some improvements in material intensity appeared. Still about two times lower EU-15 average per capita consumption values creates high possibilities not to follow Western consumption patterns and gain from the efficiency improvements and material savings in Lithuania.