Environmental impacts of the consumption of EU and EU countries

As part of its commitment towards more sustainable production and consumption, the European Commission developed a LCA-based framework, which allows assessing the environmental impacts related to EU consumption and production including two indicators: the Consumption Footprint and the Domestic Footprint (Sanye Mengual & Sala, 2023). The Consumption Footprint assesses the environmental impacts of the consumption at EU and at Member States level (Note: The Consumption Footprint can be also applied to different geographical scales, such as city level as performed for the case of Turin (Italy) - Genta et al. 2022), including embodied impacts due to trade (consumption perspective) including the 16 impacts of the Environmental Footprint method (EC, 2021) (e.g. climate change, ecotoxicity, land use related impacts, water use related impacts, etc.). The Consumption Footprint includes around 165 representative products from five areas of consumption (Food, Mobility, Housing, Household goods and Appliances). The overall impacts of consumption combine data for each representative product regarding consumption intensity and cradle-to-grave environmental impacts based on LCA. The indicator offers a high level of granularity providing results from EU level to product level and within the life cycle of the product (e.g., manufacture processes, environmental emissions). This allows to use the indicator as model for specific scenarios from the micro- to the macro-scale. The assessment of consumption impacts can be complemented with the Domestic Footprint, which assesses the environmental impacts of domestic production and consumption activities taking place within the territory based on environmental statistics and modelling (Sanye Mengual et al., 2022).

The model to assess the environmental impacts of consumption and production may serve policies makers for three main aspects that can support the analysis of both existing and future policies:

• Monitoring of policies along time, including analyses from different perspectives (e.g., decoupling)
• Identification of hotspots at different levels (e.g., area of consumption, product, life cycle stage, environmental emission)
• Analysis of policy and green transition scenarios

The Consumption Footprint is a set of 16 LCA-based indicators, aimed at quantifying the environmental impacts of an average EU citizen, based on the consumption of goods in 5 areas (food, mobility, housing, household goods, and appliances) (Sala & Sanyé Mengual, 2022).

The Consumption Footprint implements the Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) methodology, which entails four main steps:

1. Definition of goal and scope. This step includes the overall design of the study, e.g. the definition of the specific objectives of the study, the description of the modelling assumptions, the identification of the intended audience etc.
2. Definition of the life cycle inventory (LCI). In this step, data on inputs, i.e. resources, and outputs, i.e. emissions in the environmental compartments (air, water, soil), entering and leaving the system under study should be collected.
3. Assessment of the environmental impacts. In this step, the environmental impacts due to resources use and emissions reported in the inventory are calculated through the use of impact models. Sixteen indicators referred to different impacts are considered, such as climate change, eutrophication of water bodies, use of fossil, mineral and metal resources. Furthermore, endpoint assessment models can be applied to assess effects of these 16 impacts on 3 areas of protection, i.e. human health, ecosystem health, and natural resources. These 16 indicators may be normalised by global impacts and weighted to be summarised in one “single score” indicator. Compared to the 16 indicators, the single score indicator has the advantage of being more effective for communication and for supporting the selection of alternatives, but at the same time “hides” part of the complexity of the different environmental impacts, and introduce a subjective element, i.e. weighting, which may affect the results.
4. Interpretation of the results. This step is aimed at fulfilling the goal and scope of the study. Typical questions which may be answered at this stage are “which are the most impacting stages of the supply chain?”, “which are the effects on the environment of a certain policy?”. LCA results are characterised by different sources of uncertainty which should be considered in the interpretation of the results. The definition of the life cycle inventory is subject to the availability of average information describing the system. In addition, impact assessment models are characterised by uncertainties, which to different extent influence the robustness of the 16 indicators

The Consumption Footprint encompasses the five most impacting areas of consumption, i.e. Food, Housing, Mobility, Household Goods, and Appliances. For each of them a “Basket of representative Products” has been defined and the environmental impacts of each basket has been calculated through LCA. Currently, the Consumption Footprint includes around 165 representative products. Environmental impacts of each representative product are multiplied with their consumption intensity based on apparent consumption approach (apparent consumption = production – export + import) or modelling the entire stock (e.g., mobility and housing).

The Consumption Footprint is based on the combination of:

1. the emissions to air, soil and water as well as the resources used along the life cycle of circa 165 representative products, belonging to 5 areas of consumption (food, mobility, housing, household goods, and appliances);
2. the consumption intensities of those products based on apparent consumption (= production – export + import);
3. the Environmental Footprint (EF) impact assessment method, which translates emissions and resource consumption into potential environmental impacts.

The Consumption Footprint results from aggregating the environmental impacts of consuming representative products. For each representative product, the consumption intensity is calculated for the year under analysis and multiplied by the environmental impact of the life cycle of the product (allocated to 1 year in case of a longer lifespan, e.g. durable goods).

Life cycle inventory databases are employed to obtain data for background processes (e.g., electricity production, transportation, waste treatment): ecoinvent 3.6 (Wernet et al., 2016) and Agrifootprint (Blonk Consultants, 2019).