Quantifying material stocks in long-lived products: Challenges and improvements for informing sustainable resource use strategies
Review article, 2025
Material stocks in long-lived products require over half of the annual global resource extraction for their construction and maintenance, and lock in energy use through their technical and geospatial characteristics. A thorough understanding of material stocks is therefore essential to inform sustainable resource use strategies. However, despite substantial advances in material stock research in recent decades, their robust quantification remains challenging and bears considerable uncertainties. We assess the (dis)agreement of material stock estimates from 32 recent studies across global, national, and urban scales, and propose recommendations for future work. Overall, we observe medium to high divergences between studies estimating the same material stocks. For end-use categories that aggregate multiple material stocks (e.g., buildings), most global-level estimates show divergences within 140 %. At the national level, most estimates for the USA diverge by <210 %, while those for China by <550 %. At the urban level, most estimates for Beijing fall within 90 %, and for Vienna, within 70 %. For low-income countries, non-residential buildings, and individual materials, the differences are often substantially higher, highlighting the need for an improved scientific basis for policy and planning. These disparities arise from differences in system boundaries, methodology, data sources, definitions, and lack of data to capture the diversity of material stock types. To robustly inform sustainable resource use strategies, the scientific community and practitioners should systematically assess and report sensitivity and uncertainty, and reduce the latter through transparent documentation, model intercomparisons, consensus and open-access databases, enhanced data collection, and comprehensive quantification of material stocks.
Material flow analysis
Sustainable resource management
Uncertainty analysis
Socioeconomic metabolism
Material stocks
Author
Jan Streeck
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
André Baumgart
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
H. Haberl
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
F. Krausmann
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Bowen Cai
Wuhan University
Tomer Fishman
Leiden University
Maud Lanau
Chalmers, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Building Technology
Peter Berrill
Leiden University
Universität Berlin
Zhi Cao
Nankai University
Tianjin University
Sebastiaan Deetman
Leiden University
David Frantz
University of Trier
Volker Krey
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Alessio Mastrucci
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Alessio Miatto
Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO)
Stefan Pauliuk
University of Freiburg
Lola Sylvie Annie Rousseau
Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)
Shoshanna Saxe
University of Toronto
Danielle Densley Tingley
University of Sheffield
Gamze Ünlü
International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis
Dominik Wiedenhofer
University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences
Resources, Conservation and Recycling
09213449 (ISSN) 18790658 (eISSN)
Vol. 221 108324Driving Forces
Sustainable development
Subject Categories (SSIF 2025)
Environmental Sciences
DOI
10.1016/j.resconrec.2025.108324