Free MFA articles in Journal of Industrial Ecology

   It will surprise no one that scientists and policy makers around the globe are concerned that humanity is using resources at rates that are accelerating and often unsustainable.  The challenges range from resource availability to the impacts of the extraction and use of those resources.
            For more than a decade, the Journal of Industrial Ecology has published scientific articles on theories, methods and tools to assess these flows of materials and their impacts, in order to contribute to the understanding of environmental and resource problems and to the development of useful solutions. These approaches include material flow analysis (MFA), substance flow analysis (SFA), life cycle assessment (LCA), environmental input-output (I-O) analysis and various combinations, at various scales from micro to global.   The Journal of Industrial Ecology (JIE) is a peer-reviewed international scientific journal owned by Yale University and published by Wiley-Blackwell.
            The October 2009 issue of the Journal of Industrial Ecology and much of the December 2009 issue are devoted to a very practical and timely topic: What is the power of tools such as MFA to support policy and management decision making and what are the real world examples of their use?   With funding from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U. S. National Science Foundation, the JIE has been able to solicit and compile a wide range of studies on this topic.  (The research published here does not, of course, necessarily represent the views of the funders.)
            How has MFA been applied and how useful is it? The answer, as illustrated by the peer-reviewed articles in these special issues, is encouraging. The 13 articles in these two issues ­- too many excellent articles were submitted to print in one issue ­- describe a variety of ways in which MFA and related approaches have improved system understanding in real world situations around the globe, particularly relating to problems of resource scarcity, pollution abatement and waste management.
        To make recent successes better known, the entire set of articles from the two issues has been made freely available on the JIE’s web site (http://www.wiley.com/go/ appsmfa/).   A limited number of free print copies are available for students, researchers from developing countries and journalists (contact: indecol@yale.edu)