Oxford City Council report finds that the city consumes 12,000 tonnes of food, fuel and building materials every day

Every single day, the city of Oxford consumes enough material to fill a freight train one-and-three-quarter miles long.

Along with 2,500 tonnes of biomass (fuel, livestock feed, timbers and wood pulp) and 860 tonnes of metal ore our city's daily consumption tops 12,000 tonnes.

The study commissioned by Oxford City Council is thought to be the first time a local authority has ever calculated its own material consumption.

Now the council is hoping the startling stats will galvanise some of the city's biggest consumers to look more seriously at the carbon footprint of their products.

Board member for environment John Tanner said: "The car factory and the hospitals are already cutting emissions every day but we're saying they should also look at the distance their materials have to travel.

"This report is looking at where best to source some of those things.

"I wouldn't want to tell purchase managers what to do, but I do want to discuss with them the best way of doing things."

But as well as cutting carbon, the council also hopes the study will help Oxford businesses safeguard against global fluctuations in commodity supplies.

To that end, the report by development consultancy 3Keel compiled league tables to show just how at-risk certain parts of Oxford life are:

At the top of the table are building projects (houses and offices); transport, flood control and food.

That means those elements of everyday life are most at the mercy of global material supplies.

For example, of the 410 tonnes of food Oxford consumes every day, just one per cent is local, half is from the UK and the rest comes from abroad, so fluctuations in the value of the pound, the price of fuel and stability of supply lines all put that supply at risk.

City council sustainable city team manager Mairi Brookes said: "We wanted to get a feeling for what underpins our functioning as a city but also what is in our blind spot, so we could be more resilient to global factors like climate change and the global economic picture."

The big hitters singled out by the council have already taken massive strides to improve sustainability.

Mini spokesman Steve Wrelton added: "We source our materials from across the UK and internationally. Thanks to technological advances and better recycling and recovery techniques we have seen a dramatic reduction of around 90 per cent in the amount of waste we send to landfill over the last 10 years."

But the Material Oxford report authors have made four recommendations for how Oxford can be even more carbon neutral.

Firstly, they say: "We should use our universities to help us understand, measure, track and benchmark our material issues, using the framework of this report as a starting point".

They also recommend setting new, high standards for "smart material and resource use", "city-wide resource management" and collaborative city-wide investment in energy, food, flood resilience, housing and transport.

Read the full report online at lowcarbonoxford.org/reports/material-oxford