Material Flow Cost Accounting (MFCA): To be Integrated with LCA toward Sustainability

Material Flow Cost Accounting as an Approach to Improve Resource Efficiency in Manufacturing Companies

What potentials do manufacturing companies have for identifying inefficiencies in their use of resources? Assessing the products with regard to their durability, functional usefulness, use of materials, etc. is only one aspect of the exercise. The actual production operations and the search for in-plant inefficiencies represent the other. In Germany, the material flow cost accounting (MFCA) met...

Accounting for ecosystem services in Life Cycle Assessment, Part II: toward an ecologically based LCA.

Despite the essential role of ecosystem goods and services in sustaining all human activities, they are often ignored in engineering decision making, even in methods that are meant to encourage sustainability. For example, conventional Life Cycle Assessment focuses on the impact of emissions and consumption of some resources. While aggregation and interpretation methods are quite advanced for e...

Sustainability and National Accounting

Toward an Integrated Decision Support Framework for Sustainability CAE

Sustainability evaluation is typically conducted after the product is completely designed. However, sustainability, like cost and weight, needs to be managed on a continuous basis, throughout the product development cycle. This requires a decision support tool that provides sustainability analyses estimates at early design phases to guide detailed design. Such a decision support tool can be fac...

Raw Material Equivalents: The Challenges of Accounting for Sustainability in a Globalized World

The indicator domestic material consumption (domestic extraction + imports – exports) is widely used to track the scale, composition, and dynamics of material use. As production increasingly occurs at a spatial distance from the demand it ultimately satisfies, new accounting challenges arise that this indicator may not be able to meet. In response, indicators in raw material equivalents (RME) h...