Material flow accounting as a tool for industrial ecology

Material flow accounting (MFA) has been developed and applied to systematically describe the flow of materials, including resources, products, wastes and other emissions. An overview of the MFA methodology and empirical results from an international joint study of MFA at the nationwide scale are presented. From the nationwide scale to the company or process level, MFA can play an important and useful role for benchmarking and improvement of resource productivity and environmental efficiency. At any scale, further integration of MFA with monetary/cost accounting will provide us with better insights. Meso-scale studies with economic input-output analysis of inter-industrial material flows is one of the promising approaches to link micro-level and macro-level studies. MFA for specific local/regional areas will be another interesting target of study from the perspective of industrial ecology