A hybrid multi-region method (HMR) for assessing the environmental impact of private consumption

The environmental load from consumption can be reduced by changing consumption patterns. For an effective consumer policy to reduce the environmental load from society, we need insight into the environmental load from consumption patterns. This requires detailed accurate quantitative environmental information about many consumer products. Current methods for establishing this information about many consumer products do not combine process data with multiregional data. This paper aims to give more insight into the added value of using multiregional data and process data. It also proposes to combine both kinds of data into one application. The use of multiregional input-output data appears to be important to establish the total environmental load from consumption. Using multiregional data and process data both result in substantial changes in the estimated environmental load of consumption products on a more detailed level. The results indicate that using both multiregional and process data will improve the estimates of the environmental impacts of consumption patterns. Therefore, we propose a hybrid multi-region (HMR) method, which is successfully applied for the Netherlands. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.