Reinout Heijungs

TL;DR: In this paper, the authors discuss methods for analysing the physical interactions between the economy and the environment, and the historic roots of such methods lie back to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who used the term "metabolism" (Stoffwechsel) to imply a relationship of mutual material exchange between man and nature, an interdependence beyond the widespread notion of man simply 'utilising nature'.

TL;DR: By providing a common framework for topics often treated in isolation, the authors enables experts from many fields, including scholars of environmental, resource and ecological economics, environmental science as well as researchers and professionals within industrial ecology, to understand the full depth and range of the material.

TL;DR: The authors discusses the use of generic environmental models to make an assessment of potential hazards for men and the environment on the basis of moderately specific data, and can hence be seen as an attempt to bridge the gap between the economy-wide character of most economic models, necessitating the lumping of pollutants with a subsequent loss of details, requiring very detailed information on nature and release pattern of pollutants.

TL;DR: The core of the proposal is to redefine the concept of dimension in a stricter sense, namely as mutually independent directions, and to interpret the modifiers/descriptors as parameters of which the dimensions are a function.