Pursuing a responsible and sustainable development, the United Nations urged to decouple
economic growth from environmental impacts. Several European Union (EU) policies have
been implemented towards such goal. Although multiple authors have evaluated the decoupling
of the economic growth from the resource use or environmental concerns, the environmental
assessment mostly focused on pressures rather than impacts, and used single indicators
assumed to be a proxy of the overall effects on the environment. Furthermore, no studies
were found using a process-based life cycle approach to quantify the environmental
impacts of consumption. To solve such research gap, this paper assesses the decoupling
in the EU focusing on potential environmental impacts, complementing a production-based
approach with two options for accounting for the impacts of consumption. The aim of
this paper is to evaluate the decoupling of the economic growth (in terms of Gross
Domestic Product) from the environmental impacts due to EU-28 consumption, assessed
by means of life cycle assessment (LCA). The decoupling is then assessed in impact
terms rather than limited to pressures by using the Environmental Footprint (EF2017)
indicators, which allows assessing 16 different impacts. The Consumption Footprint
indicator quantified the environmental impacts of EU apparent consumption, including
the territorial impacts (Domestic Footprint) and the embodied impacts in both imports
and exports (Trade Footprint). The inventory of pressures for the trade component
is compiled either with a bottom-up approach (process-based LCA of representative
traded goods) or a top-down approach (input-output-based LCA). Methodological aspects
influencing the decoupling assessment and the resulting outputs are presented and
discussed. According to the results, the environmental impacts of EU-28 consumption
showed decoupling during the last decades (2005–2014), between relative to absolute
decoupling depending on the inventory modeling approach taken. Some countries showed
higher decoupling levels than others displaying a heterogeneous map of EU-28 decoupling,
which was led by acidification, particulate matter, land use and eutrophication impacts.
Notwithstanding current limitations, the assessment of decoupling using consumption-based
environmental indicators is very promising for supporting policy-making towards addressing
the actual impacts driven by the EU production and consumption system.