trends and future of sustainable development - TransEco

Consumption (TMC) is a deriavite of TMR. TMC equals TMR minus exports and their hidden flows.Thus TMC is a proxy of all potential environmental pressures associated to the disposal of residualmaterials to the domestic environment.4. Ecological rucksacks and hidden flow multipliersOne new recent developments of MFA is the attention drawn to hidden flows, i.e. those material flowswhich arise when natural resources are exploited but which do not enter the sphere of economic activity.This point of view is based on the MIPS (Material Input Per Service) concept, developed by FriedrichSchmidt-Bleek (1994), which uses the amount of material invested in a given service over its entire lifecycle as a gross indicator of its potential environmental impact. Even though the MIPS was originallyintended for evaluating individual products and services, it may also be applied to whole economies andto geographical areas. The principal concept of the MIPS is that of the "ecological rucksack" of a productor material, which also includes the material flows involved in its manufacture and use but which do notform part of the product or material itself.In Europe the Wuppertal Institute has been compiling country specific data to determinate thecoefficients of hidden flows. The work on determining these multipliers as they vary a lot depending onthe originate location is very labourite and time-consuming. At the current stage the dynamics thecoefficients is very slow and the major challenge is to establish a database of dynamic multipliers whichvary in time. To determine coefficient the concept of Material Input (MI) which constitutes in two partsthe weight of the product itself and the ecological rucksack related and is also the basis to calculate MIPS(Material Input per Service) can be used to determine some of the multipliers. Further the MaterialIntensity which is important concept of the MIPS calculation can be measured on the basis of MI.Material Intensity by definition is the relation between MI (sum of the used resources) and weight unit(Ritthoff, Rohn & Liedthe 2002, 12). Material Intensities can be determined tonnes per ton produced butalso e.g. tonnes per MWh for energy carriers. To determine some of the hidden flow multipliers ofimported products we have used some of the material intensities determined by Wuppertal Institute.5. Domestic flows in FinlandThere exist three indicators for describing the quantity of material flows in the domestic economy. Theseindicators are Direct Material Input (DMI), Domestic Material Consumption (DMC) and DomesticProcessed Output (DPO). DMI includes all natural resources used directly in an economy, DMCdescribes the amount of domestic and imported material used in economy and DPO is the sum ofdomestic extraction and imports. Direct and hidden domestic material flows in Finland from 1945 to2007 are presented in figure 2.80