Material accounting

Material flow accounting (MFA) is the study of material flows on a national or regional scale. It is therefore sometimes also referred to as regional, national or economy-wide material flow analysis.

The goal of material flow accounting is to ensure national planning, especially for scarce resources, and to allow forecasting. It also allows to assess environmental burdens through economic activities of a nation or to determine how material intensive an economy is.

The principle concept underlying MA is a simple model of this interrelation between the economy and the environment, in which the economy is an embedded subsystem of the environment. Similar to living beings, this subsystem is dependent on a constant throughput of materials and energy. Raw materials, water and air are extracted from the natural system as inputs, transformed into products and finally re-transferred to the natural system as outputs (waste and emissions). In order to highlight the similarity to natural metabolic processes, the terms “industrial” or “societal” metabolism have been introduced......