Lessons learned from conducting a company-level, downstream MFA

Abstract

Material Flow Analysis (MFA) has been widely used to assess national and regional material flows. The use of MFA at the organizational level is less established. This paper presents research that uses MFA to examine the end-of-use (EoU) product management for an international steel component manufacturer and offers lessons learned from the process. It is found that MFA is useful for mapping product flows and material losses. Also, dividing the initial product flow into sub-flows helps indicate feasibility of improved company-level EoU product management. Finally, results indicate that some material losses can be delayed while others can be avoided altogether.