Material flow accounting

Material flow accounting is an approach in social metabolism research, used to investigate material exchange processes of economies with their natural environment. It provides mass balanced information on extraction, trade and consumption of materials, changes in stocks and the outflows of waste and emissions. By this it allows to link economic activity to environmental pressures occurring at the input and output side of societies metabolism. Material flow accounts are used in science and policy to monitor and analyze patterns of material use across countries, long term trends in material flows and underlying driving forces, ecologically unequal exchange as well as material intensity of economic activity and the (de)coupling of resource use from economic growth. Current research frontiers are the advancement of material flow accounting to include flows of secondary materials for an assessment of circular economy and a better representation of in-use stocks of materials for investigating links between stocks and flows of materials, service provision and well-being.