Domestic material consumption (DMC) per capita

Domestic material consumption (DMC) per capita is a national-accounts-style indicator of the physical amount of materials used by an economy per person in a given year. It covers four major material groups—biomass, fossil energy materials/carriers, metal ores, and non-metallic minerals—and is calculated as domestic extraction plus imports minus exports, expressed per capita.

This statistic is a useful lens on resource intensity and infrastructure buildout: countries with large construction booms or extractive industries often show high DMC per person, while service-oriented or resource-constrained economies tend to have lower values. DMC is an “economy-wide” measure (not household waste): it captures materials used across production and consumption within a country, and it differs from “material footprint” (raw material equivalents) which reallocates upstream extraction through trade.