Material input per service unit

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Material input per service unit (MIPS) is a basic measure for estimating the environmental stress potential of products and services. The concept was developed by Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek at the Wuppertal Institute developed in the early 1990s to strategies for dematerialisation to support and Ecological Shrink backpack .

MIPS concept

Definition: MIPS = MI / S (material input per service unit or service unit) is the life cycle-wide input of natural resources MI, which is used to fulfill a human wish or need S using technical means.

With the MIPS concept, all energy and material flows that are used within the life cycle of a product or service are recorded and added up . MIPS is a quantitative measure of the natural use of a product or service. The material input is expressed in SI -compliant units, such as B. kg or t and on the service unit (service unit) such. B. a cubic meter of enclosed space.

The material input per service unit (MIPS) is a simple and manageable approach to assessing the environmental impact potential. Since output streams emanating from a product or process, such as emissions and production waste, are often very difficult to record, it is assumed, for the sake of simplicity, that a reduction in material input can also reduce environmental pollution.

The material input (MI) for the production of a good minus the net weight of this good is regarded as an ecological backpack. If the material input relates to a unit of the respective good, one speaks of the material intensity . The material input per service unit results from the reference of the material intensity to a service unit that corresponds to the desired benefit or the expected service. With this method, the material inputs determined are shown separately according to the following five categories:

  1. Abiotic material,
  2. Biotic material,
  3. Soil movement in agriculture and forestry,
  4. water and
  5. Air (components)

An aggregation of the determined values ​​is generally avoided due to the differences in the categories and the associated problems with weighting. To simplify the presentation of the results, however, abiotic material, biotic material and soil movements in agriculture and forestry can be summarized as Total Material Requirement (TMR).

criticism

A fundamentally expressed criticism of the MIPS concept is the lack of consideration of qualitative environmental aspects within the MIPS methodology. In the MIPS concept, a product or service is considered to be potentially more polluting if its MIPS value is higher than that of a comparable product or service. The MIPS concept does not compare different impact categories of already known environmental impacts, as is the case with life cycle assessments .

However, the MIPS concept in no way excludes the consideration of already known environmental impacts as additional information when assessing the environmental quality of products and services. Rather, the MIPS concept was developed for cases in which negative environmental aspects are not yet sufficiently known.

Another, related criticism of the MIPS concept is the equal adding up of different materials when calculating the material input. In these calculations, different materials such as gold or excavated soil are treated equally. However, gold and soil have completely different MIPS values ​​per se, which of course is included in the calculations accordingly (gold has a MIPS value of 540,000, soil a value of 1).

In practice it has been shown that the level of the MIPS value often corresponds to the negative environmental impacts known today. For example, one of the highest calculated MIPS values ​​has fissile uranium.

Practical example: MIPS house

Mipshaus is a term for a building that is resource- optimized according to the MIPS concept . It describes a resource standard of a building and is therefore the further development of the energy standards that already exist for buildings such as the low-energy house or the passive house . In contrast to these standards, an assessment is not made solely according to the energy consumption in the usage phase, but expanded to include the manufacturing phase and the subsequent dismantling . This extends the consideration to the entire life cycle of a building. The basis of the evaluation is not only the energy consumption, but the entire natural consumption. Based on the thesis that the substances produced in a manufacturing process are very diverse and their effects and interactions are hardly manageable, the Mipshaus standard therefore evaluates the amount of substances used. (Input consideration instead of output consideration). The substances used are divided into the five categories mentioned above.

A building is “resource efficient” when as little nature as possible is used through construction, maintenance, use and disposal. One approach to increase resource efficiency can e.g. B. also consist in saving heating energy through well-executed thermal insulation measures on the envelope surrounding the building. The production of energy sources also intervenes in the natural cycle to provide energy. The production of the insulating materials also costs nature. Here it must be taken into account whether a measure could save nature in total (see life cycle assessment ). Only rarely is it immediate, i.e. H. Without a more detailed analysis, to recognize how much material was used directly and indirectly to manufacture a certain product - the product cannot be seen.

The most important requirement for a “Mipshaus” is therefore the consideration of the life cycle-wide resource efficiency “from the cradle to the grave” already during the planning phase.

See also

literature

  • Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek: How Much Environment Do People Need? Factor 10 - The measure for ecological management. Birkhäuser, 1993; DTV, Munich 1997, ISBN 3-423-30580-0
  • Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek; with the cooperation of Willy Bierter: The MIPS concept: less consumption of nature - more quality of life through factor 10. Droemer, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-426-26982-1
  • Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek: MAIA: Introduction to material intensity analysis according to the MIPS concept. Birkhäuser, Berlin 1998, ISBN 3-7643-5949-8
  • Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek (Ed.): The Wuppertal House: Building and Living according to the MIPS concept. Birkhäuser, Basel 1999, ISBN 3-7643-6017-8
  • Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek: Green Lies. Nothing for the environment, everything for business - how politics and economics destroy the world. Ludwig, Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-453-28057-1
  • Wirtschaftswoche interview with Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek on "Green Lies", June 25, 2014
  • KLIMARETTER.INFO Review of the book "Green Lies" by Rainer Grießhammer, February 20, 2015

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