Material Flow Analysis - Historic Development of The Discipline

Historic Development of The Discipline

• Mass balance or the conservation of matter has been postulated already in ancient Greece, and it was introduced into modern chemistry by Lavoisier (cf. chapter 2.1.3 in Brunner&Rechberger.), from where it found its way to chemical engineering and finally to environmental science.
• Dennis Meadows made a wide audience aware of the physical foundation of the economy when he co-authored the bestseller Limits to Growth in 1971. Meadows et al. based their predictions on an analysis of resource stocks; see in the Glossary Glossary of environmental science#R.
• Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek is considered by many to be the father of MFA with his concept of Material Input Per Service unit (MIPS). Dr. Schmidt-Bleek is known for his work which claims that resource efficiency could be increased by a Factor 10. In the 1980s he inspired others to conduct MFA studies with him at the Wuppertal Institute and to establish research groups at other academic institutions. One example is the Sustainable Europe Research Institute (SERI) in Vienna, Austria which has developed a data base called materialflows.net.
• Mathis Wackernagel is known for co-developing the concept of the ecological footprint. Dr. Wackernagel founded the Global Footprint Network.
• The UNEP Resource Panel was set up in 2007 by the United Nations Environment Program, and is headed by Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker and Ashok Khosla. In analogy to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) it brings together experts from many disciplines and institutions to review the current state of research on societal metabolism and to communicate the latest findings to policymakers and stakeholders.