Material footprint accounting: addressing its scientific limitations

Material footprint (MF) accounting has gained prominence as an indicator of human pressure on the environment, particularly in policy discussions on resource efficiency and circular-economy strategies. While material footprint can be useful as a descriptive measure of industrial metabolism, this note argues that it exhibits several fundamental scientific limitations that distinguish it from other widely used indicators of human demand such as carbon footprints, ecological footprints, or human appropriation of net primary productivity. These limitations arise primarily from the absence of a biophysically grounded aggregation principle and the lack of an intrinsic upper bound. As a result, material footprints are analytically weaker as a sustainability metric, even though they remain valuable as a throughput indicator. To remedy, this paper outlines strategies to reduce misuse and to deploy material footprint more effectively as a tool for the sustainability transformation.