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...