Economic versus Thermodynamic Accounting - Thanatia: The Destiny of the Earth's Mineral Resources - page 53

In what follows some prominent methodologies are described 14 It should be
stated that the Life Cycle Assessment is not described here but in Chap. 4, since it
is in fact a general accounting methodology of physical processes customisable for
most of indicators.
2.6.1 Material input per unit of service
Schmidt-Bleek (1993, 1994) proposes “the material input per unit of service, MIPS”,
defined as “all materials moved in order to produce a good or a service from cradle
to grave.” He distinguish between direct and indirect or hidden material flows. The
first relates to a production of a good or service. Hidden flows refer to materi-
als removed or consumed in the form of water and energy used to produce direct
materials. MIPS is measured in kg or in tonnes of material input. It does not
discriminate in terms of quality. To address that problem and for reasons of scale,
the method proposes a grouping of material inputs into five categories immiscible
with each other: biotic and abiotic materials, earth movements, water and air.
The idea stems from the realisation that the “material rucksack” of market goods
is enormous. According to Schmidt-Bleek more than 95% of materials needed to
finish a product are converted into wastes and less than 1% of the total resource
flow are recycled. Undoubtedly, any economy based on those figures is desper-
ately ine cient in the use of resources. Therefore Schmidt-Bleek emphasises the
need for dematerialisation in the modern western lifestyle and proposes a radical
increase in resource productivity. Factor 10 is a subsequent claim and is based
on reducing material inputs to the economy from the biosphere by a factor of ten
(Schmidt-Bleek, 2008). He promotes the stimulation of recycling, re-use, eco-design,
robustness, energy integration and industrial ecology in general, so as to improve
material productivity on a cradle-to-grave basis 15 .
MIPS is an easy to understand indicator and fits well with its originating idea. It
is however a crude one since it adds different types of masses together. Additional
drawbacks are the following: it is not sensitive to contamination through heavy
metals, radioactive materials and persistent organic compounds; it does not account
for irreversibilities like material dispersion and depletion, nor mixing processes. It
therefore does not give su cient clues in order to identify and prioritise actions
that would avoid Nature's depletion and degradation. In particular, the remaining
mineral endowment or the environmental impact of mining and refining operations,
except for the tonnes of materials removed and processed are inconsequential.
14 This analysis is necessarily biased since the authors critically look at which indica-
tors/methodologies could assess the mineral capital on Earth. They do not consider them in
light of the function for which they were specifically developed (see also Sec. 3.3.3 for further
discussion).
15 See also Spangenberg et al. (1994) and Bringezu (1997).