Mining for smartphones: the true cost of tin

Report investigating the impacts of tin mining on Indonesia's Bangka island

Briefing: The Make It Better Law

Make It Better believes companies should be responsible for how their products are made and whether they hurt people or the environment.

This briefing outlines the necessity for a Make It Better law, to ensure companies report the social and environmental impacts of their supply chains.

Overconsumption? Our use of the world's natural resources

Natural resources, including materials, water, energy and fertile land, are the basis for our life on Earth. However, humanity's rapidly growing consumption of these resources is causing severe damage.

Under Pressure: How our material consumption threatens the planet´s water resources

This report looks at material consumption and water use and how they are interrelated. This report aims to raise awareness of these connections, and to contribute to the debate on resource use through various examples illustrating how water is consumed.

Hidden Impacts: How Europe's resource overconsumption promotes global land conflicts

Land is arguably one of the most taken-for-granted resources. This report examines the inter-linkages between our material use and related land requirements and highlights the very urgent need to scale down our excessive consumption of this resource.

Less is more: Resource efficiency through waste collection, recycling and reuse

Europe's reliance on materials from outside its borders is not sustainable. This report explores three different commodities - lithium, aluminium and cotton - to exemplify how our linear consumption patterns (extraction, manufacture, use and disposal) not only have major social, economic and environmental impacts, but also represent a missed opportunity for job creation and global resource security.

Europe's land import dependency

This report shows the scale of flows of 'virtual land' around the world. It calculates the global land footprint due to agriculture and forestry products for all EU countries, and for others including the US, Australia, India and Brazil. The findings demonstrate the value of the land footprint indicator and provides evidence of the scale of Europe's land consumption and its dependency on land from other parts of the world.