Empirical methods Prescriptive and policy Material input per unit of service (MIPS) is an economic concept, originally developed at the Wuppertal Institute, Germany in the 1990s.
When the service life of a product is increased, the material consumption per unit of time decreases.
The concept of total material requirement (TMR) used in many cases used in macro-level statistics and it refers to sum of abiotic and biotic resources and erosion.
Ecological backpack is calculated by subtracting the net weight of the products from the total material input of it.
[3] In many cases vast amount of resources are used or transferred in the developing world where the raw material production takes place.
It is important to find tools to illustrate these mass movements since consumption of the products by large part takes place in the developed world.
The MIPS method measures the life-cycle wide material inputs required to produce a product or service.
The MIPS method does not straightforwardly measure waste, pollution and other negative outputs produced by the human economy.
[1] MIPS provides a rough but easily understandable tool to measure overall volume and efficiency of resource use.
Røpke 2001: 130 states: “As the number of pollution problems is very large, it is difficult to construct reasonable indicators for overall environmental impact from the output side.
climate issue and CO2 emissions show that also vast amounts of non-toxic materials may contribute to environmental problems.