Material Flow Accounting Become a Popular Tool - Essay Example

We seem to be increasingly aware of the fact that the exploitation of the earth, the planet on which we are living, demands rational and honest planning(sadly) man often seems to see no other meaning in his natural environment than what serves for immediate use and consumption. Pope John Paul II, from the Encyclical Redemptor Hominis (1979) Part A The MFA has become a popular tool for both material flow and energy flow accounting, and for EIS and EMS purposes Browne (2005). The same can be said for LCA which has of late become a very popular method for the accounting framework and has been used at various spatial scales Browne (2005). These methods have proved popular at national levels following the new Think Green Trend which now seems to have taken over even the fiscal and monetary policy of the public and private sector and has often even been termed a system for integrated environmental and economic accounting. Browne (2005).The EIA and the EMS have proved to be very popular tools of the Environmental Impact Assessment strategies and the trend has so far not been restricted to the USA but many other jurisdictions are now changing their laws (particularly the EU) in order to be better able to reduce the stress on natural sources and the environmental impacts and increase the operating efficiency of certain firms which may otherwise be an environmental hazard. (Durrenberger, G., Hartmann, C.2002).The EIS is fast becoming a tool for An Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) and such a statement through the use of accounting techniques like the MFA and LCA(discussed down below will be used to give an assessment of the positive and/or negative environmental influences that a project may have on the environment. The statement will then identify and foresee the social and biological impacts ion the environment as a part of good practice and sometimes legal compulsion in many countries today to decide whether the project being undertaken is worth the damage it will have on the environment. (Durrenberger, G., Hartmann, C.2002).This method is now gaining popularity across the Atlantic and now being adopted with in the fiscal policy, accounting standards and the environmental law with in jurisdictions like Australia ,China ,the EU , New Zealand , Sri Lanka and some parts of the EEA league of countries. (Fehily, Timoney & Co. 1999).To facilitate such as analysis two techniques have developed in the yester decades to provide a more technical prediction of the environmental cost and benefit analysis. (Fehily, Timoney & Co. 1999)Firstly there is the Material flow analysis (MFA) which will amalgamate the material flows with in a development transaction and will also calculate indicators and develop strategies and measures for improving material flow systems.Thus academic opinion has endorsed it a credible method of assuring the sustainability of industrial ecology along with the techniques of LCA ( life cycle assessment).The MFA will be used while making decisions in the EMS and EIS by capturing the mass balances in an economy or an upcoming development transaction , where inputs (extractions + imports) equal outputs (consumptions + exports+ accumulation + wastes), and will utilize the laws of Thermodynamics. (Fehily, Timoney & Co. 1999).This method facilitates the decision making process in the Impact Assessment by recognizing that the total amount of matter and energy involved at each and every stage of the economic cycle is required for all economic activities. The pith and substance of the analysis thus becomes the query whether flow of materials is sustainable in terms of the environmental burden it creates. (Fehily, Timoney & Co. 1999). In an EIS statement the MFA will be used to minimize the flow of materials while maximizing the human welfare generated by the flow. This is because the MFA system is involved in the monitoring of wastes that are typically unaccounted for in traditional economic analyses. (Kahn, H., Brown, W., Martel, L. 1976). Similarly then we have the system for the life cycle assessment (LCA, also known as life cycle analysis, eco-balance, and cradle-to-grave analysis) which also the pertains to the investigation and valuation of the environmental impacts of a given product or service caused or necessitated by its existence and will be a useful tool in the configuration of the comparison of the full range of environmental damages assignable to products and services, to be able to choose the least burdensome one during the process of an EIS with in the larger purpose of conducting an EMS. (Kahn, H., Brown, W., Martel, L. 1976). Before going further it is worth looking at the empirical origins of the notions of the LCA and MFA in relation the development of the EIS and EMS.In the past many decades an extensive methodology has been developed in environmental studies and many of the approaches have actually stemmed from the life cycle approach. This approach became popular post sixties and the MFA actually became an environmental spin off of this approach.Thus the LCA will allow the EIS to include a holistic assessment needing assessment of product's existence on environment from the time the product is in initial stage of production to the time it perishes. The concept can also be used to optimize the environmental performance of a single product or to optimize the environmental performance. The use of LCA within the EIS statement will provide for deductions based on the damage created by global warming (greenhouse gases), acidification, smog, ozone, eutrophication,eco-toxicological and human-toxicological ,pollutants, desertification, and land use as well as depletion of minerals and fossil fuels. Currently the LCA and MFA approaches are used with the EIS statements through the utilization of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), a world-wide federation of national standards bodies, which has standardized this framework within the series ISO 14040 and 14044on LCA. It has defined the procedure of conducting LCA in four phases explained below.(see also Hashimoto, S., Moriguchi, Y.2003). For the use of the LCA in particular during the EIS assessment and Management the procedure will: 1) Formulate and specify the goal and scope of study in relation to the intended application. Thus this phase includes a description of the method applied for assessing potential environmental impacts and which impact categories that are included. [ISO 14040 (2006) and ISO 14044 (2006)] 2) To create a Life Cycle Inventory pertaining to data collection, modeling of product system, description and verification of data. The data collected should be related to the functional unit. Environmental and technical quantities for all relevant and within study boundaries unit processes that compose the product system should be considered.Such accounting will consist of using software packages. The results of the inventory is a life cycle impact document which includes information about all inputs and outputs in the form of elementary flow to and from the environment from all the unit processes involved in the study. [ISO 14040 (2006) and ISO 14044 (2006)] 3) Life Cycle Impact Assessment: - will evaluate the contribution to impact categories such as global warming, acidification etc. Impact potentials are calculated on the basis of LCI results. The evaluation is Normalized and weighed. (According to ISO these steps are voluntary however these processes are recommended as normalization provides basis for comparing all types of environmental impacts and weighting implies weighting factor to each impact category depending on the relative importance.) [ISO 14040 (2006) and ISO 14044 (2006)] 4) Interpretation: - . An analysis of major contributions, sensitivity analysis and uncertainty analysis leads to the conclusion whether the ambitions from the goal and scope can be met.. Sometimes an independent critical review is necessary, especially when comparisons are made that are used in the public domain. [ISO 14040 (2006) and ISO 14044 (2006)]. It is also worth noting that a number of tools and methodologies are being utilised currently in order to achieve a more successful application of the LCA and MFA .For example based on the survey conducted by Cooper JS in 2006, 58% of respondents used GABI - Product sustainability, 27% used SimaPro and 16% a series of other tools. (Cooper, J.S.,(2006).Furthermore the most popular areas with the EIS arena for the LCA have proven to be the ones used to achieve support business strategy, R&D, as input to product or process design, education and for labeling or product declarations (Cooper J.S (2006). Part 2 In this part I have been asked to assess how the application of the LCA and MFA to the environmental assessment and environmental management of the project could have improved or complicated the project of Hunter regional waste treatment plant. We have already been told that the goal and scope of the project is to provide a best waste surveillance system such that the designed waste water treatment plant bears minimum hazard to the environment. The object of study which is called functional unit for this case is liquid waste. In this regard the LCA will be able to make adjustments for the liquid waste considered which consists of combination of Industrial waste, Hazardous waste and intractable non-bat wastes. The system boundary is limited to liquid waste consisting of the above mentioned ingredients. For this purpose the inventory will pertain to the use of data collection, modeling of product system, description and verification of data. Environmental and technical quantities which are relevant and that compose the product system are determined and enlisted below. 1) Plating Wastes 2) Acid 3) Alkali 4) Inorganic Sludge. 5) Oily water 6) Wash waters / Inert 7) Grease Trap Wastes Furthermore then the assessment will provide for the evaluation of the contribution to impact categories such as global warming, acidification etc. Impact potentials are calculated on the basis of LCI results which are obtained by software simulation. The evaluation is normalized and weighed. This will help determine which Impact Category is more severe as compared to the others. In a similar vein the MFA when applied here for the EMA purposes allow us to understand the objectives of the project as being to achieve results for the minimum quantity of material for disposal to sewer and /or landfill as well as minimum liquid disposal cost. What then are the benefits or drawbacks of using these approaches Benefits 1. Firstly the MFA will allow techniques like considering a model of the paper and waste paper management system for a city in the U.K. It will be assessed whether it is feasible to go after systems like, re-use of water, removal of acid waste and its recycling. 2. These two accounting techniques allow an optimization consisting of minimizing a social cost function is to be considered. The environmental impacts involved in the liquid waste treatment system, are internalized as monetary costs to society, which are added to the operational costs of system processes to give the social cost function. Thus, minimizing this social cost should give a measure of the sustainability of the system by minimizing the environmental impacts for a given level of cost. This is a major benefit to be achieved here. 3. Other benefits will most certainly include the ability for the EIS to take into account a direct quantitative measure of the actual material and energy flow through the Hunter project.The LCA and MFA will also clearly quantify the linkage of environmental problems and human activities, and serve as a systems-wide diagnostic procedure related to environmental problems, supports the planning of adequate management measures and provides for monitoring the efficacy of those measures. 4. Thus these systems will become warning signals and allow for early warning and detection of hazards in the EMS and support precautionary measures. Furthermore the MFA provides aggregated information to support decision making in the EMS and is flexible in that it can be applied at different levels of economic activity. The use of these techniques can thus promote a variety of sustainable business development practices such as Zero Waste, Increased Resource Productivity, and Extended Producer Responsibility, all of which can allow for better EMS and practical, market based solutions to environmental problems. (Krausmann, et al . 2003). Drawbacks and criticism However all is not well here as there are a number of Drawbacks of these accounting techniques which can hinder an effective EMS and EIS assessment. This is mainly because of the complexity of the liquid waste management system and the number of uncertainties in costs and environmental impacts, a scenario approach was adopted for the analysis. Due to great uncertainty in the costing of environmental impacts, a set of low and a set of high values can be chosen. These values can be used to internalize the monetary costs to society of environmental impacts. With low values assigned to environmental externalities, recycling of acid and water re-use was found to be the optimal choice. However, with higher values attached to environmental impacts, other waste options offer lower benefits to society and are preferred to be destroyed. (Krausmann, et al . 2003). The use of LCA and MFA has significant impact on the overall process of liquid waste water treatment plant. It helped to design a system with minimal waste disposal cost as well as system bearing minimum hazardous impact to the environment. Identification of waste is a major issue in MFA. It accounts for all material and energy used in production and consumption, including the hidden flows, rucksack, of materials that were extracted in the production cycle but which never entered the final products. (Krausmann, et al . 2003).Last but not the least there is a fair amount of empirical evidence to show that the MFA and LCA can "green" the accounting process. According to Krausmann et al. (2003) "The MFA emphasizes the "non-water, non-air" fraction of socio-economic metabolism although separate accounts for these are feasible and that the MEFA framework offers opportunities to test hypotheses on whether ecological sustainability criteria may require limiting economic growth or whether growth and sustainability may be reconciled (Krausmann et al., 2003, p. 15 in Browne 2005) References 1. Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology (2000), Sustainable City - Region Working Paper 19: Methods and Tools, Centre for Urban and Regional Ecology, University of Manchester, Manchester, 2. Department of the Environment and Local Government (2002a), "Making Ireland's development sustainable - review, assessment and future action", National Report for Ireland, World Summit on Sustainable Development, August/September, Government Publications Office, Dublin, . 3. Durrenberger, G., Hartmann, C. (2002), "Regional energy and CO2 scenarios: a decision support tool for policy makers", Environmental Impact Assessment Review, Vol. 22 No.5, pp.449-61. 4. Fehily, Timoney & Co. (1999), Waste Management Plan for Tipperary South Riding, South Tipperary County Council, Tipperary Town, 5. Hashimoto, S., Moriguchi, Y. (2003), "Proposal of six indicators of material cycles for describing society's metabolism: from the viewpoint of material flow analysis", Resources, Conservation and Recycling, Vol. 40 No.3, pp.185-200. 6. Kahn, H., Brown, W., Martel, L. (1976), The Next 200 Years: A Scenario for America and the World, William Morrow, New York, NY, . 7. Krausmann, F., Haberl, H., Erb, K.H., Wackernagel, M. (2003), "Resource flows and land use in Austria 1950-2000: using the MEFA framework to monitor society-nature interaction for sustainability", Land Use Policy, Vol. 21 No.3, 8. Wikipedia Encyclopedia 9. ISO 14040 (2006): Environmental management - Life cycle assessment -Principles and framework, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva 10. ISO 14044 (2006): Environmental management - Life cycle assessment -Requirements and guidelines, International Organization for Standardization (ISO), Geneva]. 11. The Life Cycle Initiative International Life Cycle Partnership for a sustainable world 12. Cooper, J.S., J. Fava "Life Cycle Assessment Practitioner Survey: Summary of Results," Journal of Industrial Ecology (2006) 13. http://www.sustainablescale.org/ConceptualFramework/UnderstandingScale/MeasuringScale/MaterialFlowAnalysis.aspx The sustainable scale project, 2003 Santa-Barbara Family Foundation. 14. The Reference Sustainability System - A network model for Material Flow Accounting by Timothy J. Foxon and Matthew Leach. 15. Browne (2005)"A comparative analysis of the application of sustainability metric tools using Tipperary Town, Ireland, as a case study ,David Browne, : Management of Environmental Quality: An International Journal,Volume: 16,Number: 1,Year: 2005 ,pp: 37-56,Emerald Group Publishing Limited Read More