Corrado Sara, Rydberg Tomas, Oliveira Felipe, Cerutti Alessandro, Sala Serenella
European Commission, Joint Research Centre, Via Enrico Fermi 2749, I-21027, Ispra, VA, Italy.
IVL Swedish Environmental Research Institute, 100 31, Stockholm, Sweden.
J Clean Prod. 2020 Feb 10;246:118954. doi: 10.1016/j.jclepro.2019.118954.
Ensuring responsible production and consumption is one of the United Nations' Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to which the European Union (EU) has committed. An increasing body of literature has demonstrated that global trade flows are key contributors to the environmental impacts of consumption. Indeed, very often developed countries import fuels and other resources from developing ones, displacing a large share of environmental burdens related to consumption of goods outside their boundaries. This paper has a triple goal. Firstly, it assesses the environmental impacts of traded goods with a bottom-up approach, adopting life cycle assessment (LCA) and identifying hotspots related to EU consumption. Secondly, it analyses the extent to which the trade of goods is contributing to the environmental impacts of EU apparent consumption. Finally, it compares the contribution of environmental impact of EU traded goods against overall global impacts. Forty representative products imported or exported by the EU were selected based on their relevance in mass and economic value according to official trade statistics. LCA was applied to these products using the EU Environmental Footprint method. The results were then upscaled in order to be representative of the entire impact of traded goods in the EU. Overall, consumption in the EU resulted to cause considerable environmental impacts outside EU boundaries and impacts of imports and exports were mostly associated with few products groups, which either were traded in large quantities (e.g. "Fuels and mineral oils") or had a high impact intensity compared to the others (e.g. "Pulp of wood and other cellulosic material" for land use).
确保负责任的生产和消费是联合国可持续发展目标（SDGs）之一，欧盟（EU）已致力于此目标。越来越多的文献表明，全球贸易流动是消费对环境影响的关键因素。事实上，发达国家经常从发展中国家进口燃料和其他资源，从而将与境外商品消费相关的大部分环境负担转移出去。本文有三个目标。首先，它采用自下而上的方法，通过生命周期评估（LCA）并识别与欧盟消费相关的热点问题，来评估贸易商品的环境影响。其次，它分析商品贸易对欧盟表观消费的环境影响的贡献程度。最后，它比较欧盟贸易商品的环境影响贡献与全球总体影响。根据官方贸易统计数据，基于其在质量和经济价值方面的相关性，选择了欧盟进出口的40种代表性产品。使用欧盟环境足迹方法对这些产品应用生命周期评估。然后对结果进行放大，以代表欧盟贸易商品的整体影响。总体而言，欧盟的消费在欧盟境外造成了相当大的环境影响，进出口影响主要与少数产品类别相关，这些产品要么大量交易（如“燃料和矿物油”），要么与其他产品相比具有较高的影响强度（如土地使用方面的“木浆和其他纤维素材料”）。
