ABSTRACT
The productivity of using material resources is not a familiar concept. We owe it mostly to Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek, the director of the Wuppertal Institute's Division for Material Flows and Eco-Restructuring. Schmidt-Bleek has developed the material inputs per service unit (MIPS) concept, a way to determine or estimate for any well-defined service the kilograms or tonnes of materials that must be moved about somewhere in the world. For a given service, material inputs might include the tailings from a copper mine in Chile, plus the water and other materials used and moved in the manufacturing process in Mexico, plus the packaging done in Chicago, plus some materials used and moved in the final sales process. Chapter 9 explains the MIPS concept in more detail.
