Top 10% of Consumers Account for Outsized Share of Global Material Use, Study Finds
UMD researchers co-author analysis of 168 countries highlighting deep inequalities in household material use.
An international research team, including scholars from the Department of Geographical Sciences, reports that global household material use is highly unequal, with the world’s wealthiest consumers driving a disproportionate share of resource demand and environmental strain. The study, published in Nature Sustainability, shows that a small share of high-consuming households accounts for much of what researchers describe as ecological “overshoot,” or consumption that exceeds what Earth’s systems can sustainably support.
The research is co-led by the University of Maryland, with Associate Professor Kuishuang Feng and Professor Laixiang Sun among the corresponding authors.
“Resource sustainability cannot be achieved by focusing on national averages alone; the distribution of consumption matters, and the highest-consuming households drive a disproportionate share of material demand,” Sun said.
The study draws on detailed household expenditure data from 168 countries, covering about 98% of the world’s population. The researchers linked those spending patterns to a global supply-chain model that tracks how raw materials move through international production networks, allowing them to estimate household “material footprints,” defined as the total amount of raw materials required to produce and distribute goods and services households consume.
They found that in 2017 the top 10% of consumers accounted for 36% of global household material footprints, while the bottom 50% accounted for just 18%.
The gaps are especially large for nonrenewable materials such as metals and fossil fuels, which are embedded in manufactured goods, transportation and energy services. On average, the highest-consuming 10% of the households used 18.4 tons of materials per person, compared with 1.2 tons for the lowest consuming 10%. For metals alone, the top 10% consumed 113 times more than the bottom 10%.
The researchers also examined who is responsible for exceeding a proposed sustainable level of material use of about 3.1 tons per person, based on 2017 data. They estimate that the top 10% exceeded this level by about 610%, while the bottom half of the global population remained within the proposed limit.
Overall, the top 10% of consumers was responsible for 57% of total household material-use overshoot. Their share was even higher for nonrenewable materials, where they were responsible for 67% of the excess use.
Beyond documenting inequality, the study also questions whether efficiency gains alone can deliver resource sustainability. Among the wealthiest households, rising incomes translate nearly one-to-one into higher material use, suggesting that consumption growth can outstrip efficiency improvements.
“Sustainability strategies focused only on national averages and production-side efficiency may fall short unless they also address the material-intensive consumption patterns of affluent households,” Sun said.
Paper: Tian, P., Feng, K., Chen, X. et al. Consumption inequalities in material use undermining resources sustainability. Nat Sustain (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41893-025-01726-2
Main image by Sean Pollock on Unsplash
Published on Thu, 01/15/2026 - 14:43