Material
Flow Analysis, TMR and the MIPS-Concept:
A Contribution to the Development of Indicators for
Measuring Changes in Consumption and Production Patterns
by Joachim Spangenberg, Friedrich Hinterberger, Stephan Moll, and Helmut Schütz
contact
[email protected]
accepted for publication in Int. J. of Sustainable Development (IJSD), Vol 1/2, 1999
abstract
It is not the scarcity of resources that constitutes environmental problems, but their use, the physical throughput of our economies. Material flows are a proxy for the totality of the unspecific environmental risks from human activities.
As a strategic goal, an increase of the life cycle wide resource productivity by a factor 10 is explained, including the materials bought and sold and the not-valued materials: we have to take into account the product itself and its Óecological rucksackÓ.
Material flows are best measured at the input side of the economy, where their number as well as the number of entry gates is limited. Thus here regulation and economic incentives can work more efficiently and less bureaucratic than today.
The material intensity can be expressed as mips, the material input per unit of service, for products and as TMR, total material requirement on the macro level, an important element in physical input-output-tables.
Key words: Material flows, unspecific environmental risk, factor 10, mips,
TMR, ecological rucksack
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