Sustainable Resource Management

      In the industrial society where socio-economic system centers around humans, materials and fuels are constantly taken from ecological system in order to produce needed products for human consumption.
      The satisfaction of human needs requires a large amount of material input. As input and usage of materials and resources exerts great impact on the entire natural environment, discussions of input of resource, production of pollution, and materials flow in between the process have become one of the much discussed topics in recent years.
      Since 1990s, supervising organizations from highly industrialized countries such as US, Japan, Germany, and Holland have begun monitoring and calculating total materials flow in the countries as to evaluate its efficiency and set standard regulations on the investment and trade of materials flow from environmental point of view.1
      Currently, the framework of materials flow in Taiwan is in development where the usage of national resources, production of residuals and waste, and national resource structure are being evaluated and quantified. Given the economic prosperity of Taiwan, there is a surprisingly shortage of resources. As such, there are great needs for a compilation of information on Taiwan’s materials flow, so the physical cycle of materials flow can be used to determine standards of the nation’s environmental situation and sustainability.
      Given how the cycling framework between environmental and energy fields has not been clarified, CTCI Foundation aims to make it the discussion topic so as to provide executive units with an objective viewpoint when studying and laying down regulations.

1.Study of the Framework of Materials Flow in Taiwan and Establishment of Information Archive by Li Yu Ming and etc.