| Summary: | 11 Abstract In order for an economic system to function and produce goods and services necessary for meeting human needs, it behaves similarly to a living organism. It absorbs materials from the surrounding environment and transforms them into products, but ultimately all the materials are transformed into some kind of waste and emitted back into the environment. This flow of materials is referred to as industrial or socio-economic metabolism (Baccini and Brunner, 1991; Fischer-Kowalski and Haberl, 1993; Ayres and Simonis, 1994). Extraction of resources, consumption of materials and related emissions exert some pressure on the environment. So far, there has been a positive relation between meeting human needs and this pressure. The overall goal of developed countries within their strategies of sustainable development is to break the relation between pressure exerted on the environment and economic growth, which represents meeting of human needs and improvements in the standard of living. This phenomenon is called decoupling (EC, 2002, 2005, 2006; OECD, 2002; UN, 2002). One of the methods for assessing environmental pressure related to extraction and consumption of resources and materials is material flow analysis. In the case of economy- wide material flow analysis (EW-MFA), this method aims at...
|
|---|
