Material Flow Analysis
We may have entered the information age, but we certainly have not left the material age. Quite the opposite. Since the Earth Summit in 1992 in Rio De Janeiro encouraged us to “rethink economic development“ we have doubled global gross domestic product (GDP), doubled global annual crude steel production, and tripled annual output of plastics, cement, and aluminum. Current industrial production and consumption patterns depend on ever growing amounts of materials and fuels, which in turn rely on the environment as source of natural resources and sink of our wastes and emissions. Many, if not most, environmental impacts are caused by the flows of materials and energy through the economy, which makes it vital to study them. Material flow analysis (MFA) is a simple, but powerful tool to do just that. We conduct MFAs for sectors and materials of high interest and also work on continuously advancing MFA methods and theory.