TRACING MATERIAL FLOWS ON INDUSTRIAL SITES

Abstract

There are several methods known in international practice and literature under the notion of Material Flow Analysis (MFA) which are appropriate to describe in physical terms the processes of industrial metabolism and natural resource use of different materials through micro- to the macro level. The purpose of this paper is to prove that material flow analysis is a useful and effectively applicable method also on the company level, with a logic analogous with that of macro-level MFA. That is company level MFA is a chain of logical components based on each other. Further results of the analysis are the exploration of relation between the aggregation level of data and the methods applied, and the analysis of how the micro- and macro level analysis are based on each other.