Overview

Material Flow Accounts: A Tool For Making Environmental Policy describes the utility and policy applications of material flow accounts (MFA) systems for data management. MFAs track the amount of materials cycling into the economy and entering the environment at all phases of a commodity's life cycle. This type of analysis addresses major environmental policy challenges including:

• Tracking pollutants across environmental media
• Measuring progress on strategic tools for national environmental quality
• Facilitating communication among Federal offices and with the American public
• Prioritizing areas for policy intervention

This policy brief provides a practical proposal for a national Material Flow Accounting framework for the United States. After summarizing initiatives over the last decade that illustrate the material flow approach to policy making, we describe the MFA database under development at WRI as well as the data template for organizing flow data from a wide range of sources for entry into the database. To show the relevance of MFAs to chemicals policy, we select five chemicals from an EPA list of Waste Minimization Priority Chemicals to provide examples of how Material Flow data can provide policy insight. The Brief concludes with suggestions for next steps in developing an infrastructure to build MFAs to firmly establish this policy tool and support broad public debate.

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