Material Flow Management: Improving Cost Efficiency and Environmental Performance

Material flow management gets right to the core of industrial production and its environmental impact. Basically, material flows are invariably at the nucleus of industrial production. Ecological effects are initially caused by materials: consumption and entropy of scarce resources as well as emissions resulting from the production and use of products and consumer goods. It is only during recent years that the eco-efficient optimisation of these material flows, which aims at reducing costs while simultaneously de- creasing environmental impact, has become an explicit objective of both practical and scientific activities and efforts. There has been a lot of discussion, but little has been done. This book provides an overview of the pertinent research and scientific projects conducted between 1999 and 2005 in co-operation with industrial companies; the projects were initiated and founded by the Bundesmin- teriumfur Bildung und Forschung (BMBF, Federal Ministry of Education and Research). This book illustrates the current diversity of existing operational approaches and thus also points out synergetic co-ordination options. It demonstrates the high, still unutilised potential for increasing the e- efficiency of material flows: the long since existing, but yet unused overlapping areas between cost reduction and simultaneous environmental relief by means of efficient material utilisation. The reason for this suboptimal material flow efficiency essentially lies in the currently still low transparency of cross-departmental or cross-company material flows (with regard to the flowing physical quantities and volumes - in detai- the commercial costs/ values and flow times).