ENV 785b Material Flow Analysis for the Circular Economy

Faculty: Alessio Miatto

Tuesdays and Thursdays Òâ╗ 2:30-3:50Òâ╗380 Edwards Classroom

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Introduction

Every day we interact with a plethora of manmade products: laptops that allow us to connect and work, vehicles that bring us to far places in just a few hours, and buildings that are designed to provide comfortable living spaces. But where do we source the materials used in these products, and where do they go once we discard them? Meet Material Flow Analysis, an investigative tool of Industrial Ecology that tracks the material cycles in our economies. In this course, you will learn how to build a Material Flow Analysis from scratch using Microsoft Excel and Python. What do you say? No prior experience with Python? No worries, this class is for absolute programming beginners, so a lack of prior coding experience is not a problem.

Course Description

Material Flow Analysis is a tool routinely used by many scientists to monitor the consumption of national resources. In this course, students will become proficient in material flow analysis (MFA) and material stock analysis (MSA) and explore how MFA data are used to monitor material efficiency. Specifically, the course is designed to offer ample opportunities to practice with dynamic MFA—a branch of MFA that deals with multi-year data—to quantify resource consumption, estimate waste generation, and measure the circularity of a system.

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Classes alternate between frontal lectures and practical sessions. During the practical sessions, students will learn how to implement MFA and MSA analyses in Microsoft Excel and Python. The overarching theme of circularity issues provides the opportunity to reflect on various physical aspects of the economy and the extent to which circular economy initiatives can succeed.

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