Material flow analysis

MFA is an important tool to study the bio-physical aspects of human activity on different spatial and temporal scales.

MFA can also be applied to a single industrial installation, for example, for tracking nutrient flows through a waste water treatment plant.

[1] Human needs such as shelter, food, transport, or communication require materials like wood, starch, sugar, iron and steel, copper, or semiconductors.

Rising concern about global warming puts a previously unimportant waste flow, carbon dioxide, on top of the political and scientific agenda.

They need a systematic method to keep track of and display stocks and flows of the materials entering, staying within, and leaving the different processes in the anthroposphere.

Examples of more general indicators are goods such as passenger cars, materials like steel, or other physical quantities such as energy.

Unlike economic accounting, MFA also covers non-economic waste flows, emissions to the environment, and non-market natural resources.

MFA is complementary to the other core industrial ecology methods life cycle assessment (LCA) and input-output (IO) models.

MFA studies often cover the entire cycle (mining, production, manufacturing, use, waste handling) of a certain substance within a given geographical boundary and time frame.

Material stocks are explicit in MFA, which makes this method suitable for studies involving resource scarcity and recycling from old scrap.