Fresh Hacker News | Resource use matters, but material footprints are a poor way to measure it

▲Resource use matters, but material footprints are a poor way to measure it(ourworldindata.org)

16 points by surprisetalk 15 hours ago | 2 comments

▲burch45 5 hours ago

I have never heard of “material footprint” and from the definition it seems entirely worthless. The article doesn’t start with any reason why anyone would be interested in this measure, just that comment it is starting to show up in reports.

▲strken 2 hours ago

I would have assumed it would be relevant to supply chains. I too do not understand its relevance to consumption. It seems like you could substantially increase your material footprint by digging two holes and swapping the soil, which is a little silly.

That being said, GDP is also a silly measure: I pay you a billion dollars to slap yourself, you pay me a billion dollars to stomp on my own foot, and we've just raised GDP by $2bn. Despite its ridiculous nature, in practice it seems to correlate with the things we do care about.

▲bluGill 7 hours ago

Also not addressed is recycling. If you wear out same goods you can landfill it or recycle it. if we care about copper running out this matters. but as the article notes copper is a tiny amount of total material used, even though we should worry about running out.