Method Précis: Material Flow Analysis
Nina Eisenmenger
Material ﬂow accounting (MFA) aims to provide a biophysical representation of
society-nature interactions that complements purely monetary economic accounting
systems. It quantiﬁes all material ﬂows into and out of a socioeconomic system.
MFA accounts for solid, gaseous and liquid materials excluding water and
air and is measured in physical units (mass, usually metric tons) (Eurostat 2001;
OECD 2008).
MFA represents a broad family of different accounts, from national to local
levels or from aggregate materials to single substances (OECD 2008). Similar
physical accounts are used to measure stocks and ﬂows of energy, carbon and
other relevant substances (see Method Précis on Energy Flow Analysis). Within
this broader family, economy-wide material ﬂow accounting (EW-MFA) is most
widely applied and is part of standard statistical reporting in the EU (2011).
EW-MFA considers all material inputs and outputs to the system, but it treats
the socioeconomic system itself and any processes therein as a ‘black box’.
Methodological harmonization and standardization has been intensely promoted in
past few years, resulting in high consistency among available datasets (FischerKowalski
et al. 2011).
EW-MFA measures all material ﬂows that are required for the establishment,
operation and maintenance of socioeconomic biophysical stocks. By convention,
these biophysical stocks include humans, manmade artifacts (infrastructure,
buildings, vehicles, machinery, durable goods, etc.) and productive livestock (animal
husbandry and aquaculture). It follows that two system boundaries need to
be deﬁned: one between the socioeconomic system and its natural environment
and another separating it from other socioeconomic systems. Concerning the ﬁrst
boundary, material inputs ﬂows are raw materials extracted from the domestic natural
environment (domestic extraction, DE), and outputs are wastes and emissions
released to the natural environment (domestic processed outputs, DPOs). Flows
crossing the second boundary are imports from and exports to other national economies.
Following the laws of thermodynamics, particularly the law of conservation
of mass, material inputs equal material outputs corrected by stock changes
(for more details, see Eurostat 2001). Stock changes are material ﬂows to socioeconomic
stocks with a lifetime exceeding one year, or materials released from
physical stocks and transformed to wastes and emissions (Fig. 9.7).
Domestic extraction (DE) is deﬁned as the raw material extracted from nature.
It includes agricultural harvest and forestry as well as raw material extraction from
mining and quarrying. Material ﬂows are usually grouped along four main material
categories:
1. Biomass extraction includes all harvested plant-based biomass, that is, all
crops, timber, grazed biomass and crop residues further used in socioeconomic
processing. In addition, animal biomass from ﬁshing and hunting is included
willi.haas@aau.at
235Method Précis: Material Flow Analysis
RME
unused
extraction
socio-economic system
production and consumption
recycling,
re-use
stocks
Imports
Wastes,
Emissions
(DPO)
Domestic
Extraction
(DE)
unused
extraction
natural environment
RME
Exports
Fig. 9.7 Material ﬂow accounting scheme. Legend: RME = Raw material equivalent. Input and
output balancing items: to have a closed material balance, so-called balancing items have to be
introduced into the MFA framework on both the input and output sides (water vapor, air as entry
into combustion processes, etc.) (Eurostat 2001)
if it is extracted from populations of wild-living animals. Biomass production
from domestic livestock is not counted as DE.
2. Metallic minerals comprise all ores accounted for as the mass leaving the mine,
including the waste rock (‘run-of-mine’ approach).
3. Nonmetallic minerals comprise all minerals used in industrial processing and
in construction, such as sand, clays, phosphate, salt and diamonds.
4. Fossil energy carriers include all coal, crude oil, natural gas and unconventional
energy sources (such as gas hydrate, shale gas).
Material extraction data can be compiled from ofﬁcial statistics (for details, see
Eurostat 2012). Some quantities are reported in units other than metric tons per
year and must be converted into mass units. Some ﬂows are only poorly or not
at all reported in ofﬁcial statistics. In these cases, missing data have to be estimated
using standardized MFA estimation procedures (Eurostat 2012; Krausmann
et al. 2014). This applies to crop residues, grazed biomass and nonmetallic minerals
used for construction purposes. In addition, gross ores often have to be estimated
based on metal concentrates reported in statistics and the corresponding ore
grades. Estimation procedures have been developed thoroughly over the years, and
they aim to use biophysical data as a basis for the applied estimation procedure
(Eurostat 2012).
In addition to materials extracted domestically, EW-MFA accounts for imports
and exports (derived from foreign trade statistics, which report physical next
to monetary units). Trade ﬂows comprise products at very different stages of
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236 N. Eisenmenger
processing, namely, primary goods (copper ores, wheat), secondary products (copper
wires, wheat ﬂour) and ﬁnal goods (mobile phones, cakes). This makes trade
ﬂows very different from material extraction, and the allocation of traded goods to
one of the material categories is often difﬁcult. However, correspondence tables
have been developed (Eurostat 2012) that allow for an allocation of trade ﬂows
according to the main material content of the traded good.
Within the EW-MFA framework, several indicators can be calculated (Eurostat
2001; Fischer-Kowalski et al. 2011):
• Direct material input, DMI = DE + imports.
• Domestic material consumption, DMC = DE + imports − exports.
• Physical trade balance, PTB = imports − exports.
• Resource efﬁciency or resource productivity = GDP/DMC
MFA indicators are considered pressure indicators, and they are closely linked to
socioeconomic activities—that is, they are indicative of the potential magnitude
of environmental burdens related to economic activities. In order to discuss environmental
impacts, MFA indicators need to be complemented by other indicators
such as those from Life Cycle Assessments (see Method Précis on Life Cycle
Assessment). The most prominent EW-MFA indicator is DMC, which is used as a
key indicator for material use and, in relation to the GDP, as a proxy for resource
efﬁciency in general (European Commission 2011). DMC represents the materials
used within a socioeconomic system in the production process and/or in ﬁnal consumption
that are transformed into wastes and emissions.
Two other ﬂows related to the EW-MFA framework should be mentioned.
In the course of extraction from nature, materials are moved or extracted without
the intention of using them in socioeconomic processing or attributing economic
value to them. These ﬂows are commonly termed ‘unused extraction’ and
include unused by-products in agriculture (straw and roots left on the ﬁelds), bycatch
in ﬁshery, overburden in mining and soil and rock excavated during the construction
of infrastructure (Dittrich et al. 2012; Eurostat 2001). In most cases, no
statistical data are available to account for this unused extraction, and the mass of
these ﬂows has to be estimated (Bringezu and Bleischwitz 2009). Obviously, the
provision of data of sufﬁcient quality, particularly for comparison across countries
and time, is quite a challenge.
In recent years, the demand for indicators addressing the total raw material use
of a country’s ﬁnal consumption has been growing. In such an indicator, all raw
materials used in the production process of traded goods need to be considered.
MFA summarizes these raw material inputs as raw material equivalents (RMEs;
Eurostat 2001; Schaffartzik et al. 2014; see also Chap. 10 in this volume) of
traded goods. Adding (subtracting) the RME of imports and exports to (or from)
the DMC yields the indicator raw material consumption (RMC; Schaffartzik
et al. 2014; or Chap. 10 in this volume) or the material footprint (Wiedmann
et al. 2015). RMC measures the amount of raw materials extracted and used at
the global level to manufacture the products consumed in one particular country.
Recent policy documents (European Commission 2011) consider indicators such
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237Method Précis: Material Flow Analysis
as RMC to address issues such as outsourcing and its relevance for resource productivity
in forging strategies for a more sustainable use of biophysical resources.
References
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visions and policies. Shefﬁeld: Greenleaf Publishing Limited.
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willi.haas@aau.at