Sustainable Consumption and Production in the Extraction and Processing of Raw Materials—Measures Sets for Achieving SDG Target 12.2

Abstract

As part of the European Green Deal, the European Commission recently launched the project “New European Bauhaus of the 21st Century” to promote climate-neutral, affordable, and creative design approaches and transform the built environment towards sustainability. Based on a forecasting and backcasting approach, we developed three sets of measures containing eighteen individual measures, with the overall aim of reducing the consumption of mineral raw materials in line with the sustainability strategies (consistency, efficiency, and sufficiency) from exploration through material processing, to semi-finished product production. The developed measures address in detail the reduction of primary raw material consumption, the increased use of secondary raw materials, and the intensification of access to important domestic raw material sources, as well as the efficiency and productivity progression of the Austrian raw material industry. The implementation of the measures will raise the transparency and traceability of raw material routes, material flows, and supply chains through improved and comprehensive data collection and processing. The developed measures were handed over to the Austrian Federal Government in February 2022 to push the achievement of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 12 in Austria.