Column Actions

• DMC reports the number of materials that are used in a national economy.
• DMC is a territorial (production side) indicator.
• DMC also presents the amount of material that needs to be handled within an economy, which is either added to material stocks of buildings and transport infrastructure or used to fuel the economy as material throughput.

DMC describes the physical dimension of economic processes and interactions. It can also be interpreted as a long-term waste equivalent. Per-capita DMC describes the average level of material use in an economy – an environmental pressure indicator – and is also referred to as a metabolic profile.

Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) is a standard material flow accounting (MFA) indicator and reports the apparent consumption of materials in a national economy.

Belize Solid Waste Management Authority 

Belize Solid Waste Management Authority

Domestic material consumption per capita, and domestic material consumption per GDP

Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) and MF need to be looked at in combination as they cover the two aspects of the economy, production, and consumption. The DMC reports the actual amount of material in an economy, MF the virtual amount required across the whole supply chain to service final demand. A country can, for instance, have a very high DMC because it has a large primary production sector for export or a very low DMC because it has outsourced most of the material-intensive industrial processes to other countries. The material footprint corrects for both phenomena.

N/A

The DMC indicator can be disaggregated into imports, domestic extraction and exports by a large number of material follow categories. At the highest level of aggregation biomass, fossil fuels, metal ores, and non-metallic minerals are distinguished.

It is calculated as direct imports (IM) of material plus domestic extraction (DE) of materials minus direct exports (EX) of materials measured in metric tonnes. DMC measures the number of materials that are used in economic processes. It does not include materials that are mobilized the process of domestic extraction but do not enter the economic process. DMC is based on official economic statistics and it Last updated: 12 February 2018 requires some modeling to adapt the source data to the methodological requirements of the MFA. The accounting standard and accounting methods are set out in the EUROSTAT guidebooks for MFA accounts in the latest edition of 2013. MFA accounting is also part of the central framework of the System of integrated Environmental-Economic Accounts (SEEA).

DMC cannot be disaggregated to economic sectors which limit its potential to become a satellite account to the System of National Accounts (SNA).

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.