Recent literature has argued that environmental efficiency (EE), which is built on the materials balance (MB) principle, is more suitable than other EE measures in situations where the law of mass conversation regulates production processes. In addition, the MB-based EE method is particularly...

Environmental efficiency measures constructed using the materials balance principle have two important shortcomings: (1) the ambiguity in the treatment of immaterial inputs and the various types of energy and (2) the lack of universally accepted weights for various material inputs. These two...