Abstract Summary
In recent years, implementing a circular economy at the regional scale has been proposed by policy makers as a potential solution for achieving sustainability. In order to understand circularity of regions, a greater understanding is needed for the location of secondary resource flows. Currently, the field of urban metabolism studies the flow of resources at the regional scale. Researchers in this field (mostly consisting of industrial ecologists) have developed sophisticated methods of estimating material flows at the city and regional scale. However, currently urban metabolism studies lack a spatial perspective. While current methods give us insight to quantities of materials, less attention is given to the spatial attributes of material flows, such as level of spatial clustering and locations of hotspots. This presentation will show our recent work - identifying spatial clustering and hotspots of secondary resource reuse in the Netherlands, using spatial statistics methods. We hope that the statistical methods used in this research can be applied to future urban metabolism studies, allowing for a deeper understanding of the spatial aspects of material flows, and bridging the gap between urban metabolism and urban planning.
