– ESPEER
ESPEER: a tool for the global management of materials in the French Economy.
The national economy lies on exchanges of materials between economic activities and environment. The mapping of these flows enables the assessment of environmental impacts linked to the final consumption (households, institutions, exports) according to different scenarios of waste management and technological progress.
General objective and rationale: Global approach of resources management.
In the frame of policies aimed at decoupling resources use/environmental impacts from economic growth, ESPEER seeks to favor a global thinking approach by integrating natural resources management in the development of industrial and service activities. We develop a model and a tool able to link the economic system, the consumption of resources, the manufacturing of products, the waste generation and the pollution. The tool allows the assessment of the effects of waste management policies on waste generation, the atmospheric impacts and resources consumption. Further, it allows the assessment of the needs in natural resources and the impacts of final consumption, giving indications on decoupling.
The IOT represent synthetic tables of national accounts. They are published annually by Eurostat. The tables are adapted to the needs of the scenarios defined in the project by disaggregations allowing to show new products/activities. Disaggregation is obtained particularly using “technology models” including LCA data. All environmental extensions (emissions, resources consumption, waste generation) are also disaggregated. The Leontief inverse allows to link these environmental extensions to final consumption.
The LCA on the whole economy of waste scenarios shows that recycling induces a significant reduction in the need of primary resources (metals, quarrying products), despite the increase of the final demand. However, this phenomenon is limited concerning energy consumption and associated emissions (fossil C02, S02 and NOx).
The assessment of the needs of copper within our economy allows the identification of the sectors the most demanding (in tonnage), the sectors the most intensive (in kg/€), and reveals a rather important contribution of services in the economic risks associated to a potential reduction of copper supply.
The mapping method covers all sectors of the economy and allows potentially the representation of numerous quantities characteristic of flows: monetary value, mass, chemical elements, or even other quantities less palpable like “complexity”, “toxicity”, etc. In the frame of the development of systems for economic and environmental accounting, the method is holistic and allows the verification of the balances of additive quantities. A concrete perspective for BRGM is the elaboration of a database of metals.
On another hand, it is possible to exploit the parallelism of data of different quantities (money and mass for example), on the total system of the national economy. These possibilities offer perspectives concerning the environmental and social LCAs in link with the economic system, to support policy making on resource efficiency, energetic transition, etc.
The project’s site espeer.brgm.fr gathers the documents produced : pedagogic presentations, reports, articles, xls application for auto-training, web application for waste scenarios, and the thesis of Marie Bonnin: Multicriteria optimization for a global resource management: application to French copper cycle.
Project coordination
The author of this summary is the project coordinator, who is responsible for the content of this summary. The ANR declines any responsibility as for its contents.
Partnership
Help of the ANR 759,977 euros
Beginning and duration of the scientific project:
- 0 Months
