material flow analysis

Empire of Things: How We Became a World of Consumers, From the Fifteenth Century to the Twenty-First

by Frank Trentmann  · 1 Dec 2015  · 1,213pp  · 376,284 words

want to know how wasteful or efficient societies have been when squeezing value out of matter, that is, the ‘material intensity’, or productivity, of stuff. Material-flow analysis is not perfect. The flow has mainly been measured using national accounts. These include how much material a society imports and exports, but, since they

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goods with relatively lower environmental impact, although, in total, of course, they have more stuff than their poorer neighbours.107 Still, however rough and limited, material-flow analysis does give us at least a sense of the general picture of how much material is needed to prop up our way of life. Humans

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-class neighbourhoods had mobilized around a ‘Not in My Back Yard’ sentiment and then dumped their waste and pollution on to poor and black communities. Material-flow analysis reveals an even more dramatic global version of Nimby-ism. In the 1950s, Europe and the United States, by and large, still lived mainly off

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth

by Juliet B. Schor  · 12 May 2010  · 309pp  · 78,361 words

paid relatively little attention to how these materials move through and across economies. But that is changing. One of the most interesting metrics is called material flow analysis. MFA tracks the extraction of resources through production and consumption. The field is still in its infancy, and not well known in the United States

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and putting-out systems of scale and efficiency of marketing Marks and Spencer Massachusetts Executive Office of Energy Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) mass extinctions material flow analysis materiality paradox Meadows, Dennis Meadows, Donella “Dana,” meat methane Mexico, ecological footprint in Michigan, University of microcombines microfarming microgeneration money discount rate and- Mozilla multifunctionality

Making the Modern World: Materials and Dematerialization

by Vaclav Smil  · 16 Dec 2013  · 396pp  · 117,897 words

the infamous recycling center in Guiyu, in China's Guangdong province. The uncertain fate of e-discards is illustrated by the fact that, in their material flow analysis of used computers in the USA, Kahhat and Williams (2012) could do no better than to offer rather wide ranges concerning the fate of 40

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.M. and Svensson, T. (1997) Life cycle assessment of flooring materials: case study. Building and Environment, 32: 245–255. Kahhat, R. and Williams, E. (2012) Materials flow analysis of e-waste: domestic flows and exports of used computers from the United States. Resources Conservation and Recycling, 67: 67–74. Kalliala, E.M. and

Material World: A Substantial Story of Our Past and Future

by Ed Conway  · 15 Jun 2023  · 515pp  · 152,128 words

most staggering thing about this statistic, however, is not just the numbers themselves but the fact that they show up in no environmental accounts or material flow analysis, which count only the refined metal. When it comes to even the United Nations’ measures of how much humans are affecting the planet, this waste