Material flow analysis

Material flow analysis (MFA) (also referred to as substance flow analysis (SFA)) is an analytical method to quantify flows and stocks of materials or substances in a well-defined system. MFA is an important tool to study the bio-physical aspects of human activity on different spatial and temporal scales. It is considered a core method of industrial ecology or anthropogenic, urban, social and industrial metabolism. MFA is used to study material, substance, or product flows across different industrial sectors or within ecosystems. MFA can also be applied to a single industrial installation, for example, for tracking nutrient flows through a waste water treatment plant. When combined with an assessment of the costs associated with material flows this business-oriented application of MFA is called Material Flow Cost Accounting. MFA is an important tool to study the circular economy and to devise material flow management. Since the 1990s, the number of publications related to material flow analysis has grown steadily. Peer-reviewed journals that publish MFA-related work include the Journal of Industrial Ecology, Ecological Economics, Environmental Science and Technology, and Resources, Conservation, and Recycling.

Human needs such as shelter, food, transport, or communication require materials like wood, starch, sugar, iron and steel, copper, or semiconductors. As society develops and economic activity expands, material production, use, and disposal increase to a level where unwanted impacts on environment and society cannot be neglected anymore, neither locally nor globally. Material flows are at the core of local environmental problems such as leaching from landfills or oil spills. Rising concern about global warming puts a previously unimportant waste flow, carbon dioxide, on top of the political and scientific agenda. The gradual shift from primary material production to urban mining in developed countries requires a detailed assessment of in-use and obsolete stocks of materials within human society. Scientists, industries, government bodies, and NGOs therefore need a tool that complements economic accounting and modelling. 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. Material flow analysis is such a method.

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