Environment and Climate Change in Asia: Ecological Footprints and Green Prospects

Chapter Five. The Material Consumption of Singapore’s Economy: An Industrial Ecology Approach

Marian CHERTOW, Esther S CHOI and Keith LEE

“Singapore, as a highly urbanized island city-state, provides a particularly interesting study site for both urban metabolism and island sustainability. One of the more distinctive findings of the study speaks to that point directly: as an island with limited land area, Singapore needs to import land itself – in the form of sand – in order to support its economic growth. That one figure alone caused great volatility across the study years. Using an MFA (materials flow analysis) approach also uncovered a trend ...