MFA vs. LCA, particularly as environment management methods in industry: an opinion

MFA was born in the 1980s, independently, in various laboratories around the world. On the one hand, Industry was trying then to put numbers on its circular economy practices, while, on the other, Academia endeavored to construct a metaphor of natural ecology (BioGeoChemical Cycles [BGCC]) or of the metabolism of ecosystems to describe the activities of the anthroposphere, especially its material and the energy flows (and stocks). This article briefly reviews the early efforts of Usinor (now ArcelorMittal) in this area, in the framework of a program called “The Cycle of Iron” and points out what it was trying to achieve: basically, analyze and evaluate a true recycling rate (RR) of steel. MFA turned out to be potentially a more powerful tool than ad hoc models of materials circularity too and Industry left the leadership to academic groups to flesh out the new methodology to confront such difficult questions as the evaluation of a RR. Then the article conducts a kind of methodological and epistemological audit of the present status of MFA, positioning it in the wide framework of descriptions of material flows in space and time, and thus picturing it as a competing methodology to LCA. While the former is macro-scale, synchronic, broadly economy-oriented, the latter is micro-scale, diachronic, product and value chain-oriented, while both “report” to different communities, the Industrial Ecology community and the LCA community respectively, and more. Both schools of thoughts have been attending SAM conferences regularly, where they have been reporting their continuous search for new developments and their search for a better sustainability assessment of materials, products, industrial systems and economic activities of all kinds. The various contributions over the first 12 SAM events are analyzed. Finally, MFA and LCA are compared, feature by feature, in terms of the communities they serve and of their strengths and weaknesses. Unsurprisingly, the conclusion is that they are more complementary than competing with each other.