Material Metabolism For Cities: Methodology And Case Study Of Handan City

The environmental problems accompanying with urbanization, to some extents, are considered to be the misuse and maladjustment of urban material metabolism. By giving the specific temporal and spatial material flux and distribution, material metabolism can decouple resource consumption with economic growth and social development. The study at urban level is expected to benefit to China which goes through the rapid urbanization.Based on the nation-wide material flow analysis (MFA), a new MFA methodology for urban material metabolism is established by integrating substance flow analysis (SFA). This framework can deal with the lack of data across the cities. Following the establishment of urban-wide MFA, a case study of Handan City is carried out. The empirical results are as follows:(1) The material stocks of Handan by the year of 2005 show that an average resident of Handan depends on a per capita stock of 1333kg/c of iron and 19.6kg/c of aluminum. Of the iron stock 66.6% is in the buildings, and of the aluminum stock 61.5% is in the buildings.(2) The MFA results of Handan in 2005 show that the"mass production, mass consumption"development model still remains. The quantity of input is 18682 Mt and of output is 16819 Mt. The pollution emissions are 987 Mt of which 96% are solid wastes. It showed that there were rich in solid waste resources and there were tremendous potentials to develop the circular economy.(3) The MFA results shows that economic growth of Handan can be observed a remarkable decoupling with resource input. Handan's economic growth depends on other regions more and more, the ratio of input matrials from other regions increased from 10.2% of 1993 to 39.2% of 2005. From 1993 to 2005, material productivity increased from 151.8yuan/t to 320.9yuan/t, while the pollution emission intensity reduced from 4.4t/Myuan to 1.7t/Myuan. (4) The empirical study of Handan proves that the integrated framework established is feasible. On one hand, it provides the unified methodological basis for comparing urban-wide MFA results by following the generic nation-wide MFA framework; on the other hand, it presents critical methodology with cost-effective data-collecting by integrating of the SFA approach and giving some brief assumptions.