A Unit for Material Independence
One FLUX is one tonne of material made from sunlight, water and biology instead of taken from the ground. It is measured by weighing, and checked by someone who is not the maker.
This page introduces the unit, the draft rules, and a list you can join if you make, review or fund such material.
Why Materials Need a Unit
Carbon has a unit, a register and a market. Materials have none. The world used 30 billion tonnes of material in 1970 and uses 106 billion now. About seven percent comes back into use. A maker who replaces a mined or drilled tonne with a grown one has no accepted way to say so. A fund that pays for it has no way to check.
A unit fixes that. It says what counts, how it is weighed, who checks it, and where the record lives. FLUX is not a carbon credit and makes no carbon claim. It counts tonnes.
How One FLUX Is Measured
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Weigh what left the site
Every tonne of product is weighed on the way out and matched to a delivery note and an invoice. Only material that reached a buyer counts.
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Tag what went in
Every input is tagged as flow or stock. Sunlight, water, air and biology are flow. Anything mined, drilled or bought as virgin material is stock. An input with no origin document is stock.
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Name what it replaced
The buyer signs a letter that names the material it used before, and attaches last year's invoices for it. A tonne that replaced nothing is not a unit.
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Count down, never up
Units are delivered tonnes, times the flow share, times the replacement ratio, rounded down. Where a rule can be read two ways, the reading that gives fewer units applies.
An Example, With Invented Numbers
A bioreactor ships 10 tonnes of biopolymer film in a quarter. Half a tonne of that mass is a fossil additive, so the flow share is 95 percent. The buyer confirms the film replaced polyethylene film of the same thickness, so the ratio is one.
Ten, times 0.95, times one, is 9.5. The site is issued 9 FLUX. The solar power, the seawater and the jobs go on the statement as context. They are not units.
Who Checks, and Who Never Does
An independent reviewer opens the sealed evidence, samples the tickets and invoices, recomputes the count, visits the site once a year, and signs. The maker never checks its own units. Neither does anyone who owns the site or holds the units.
Software does the reading and the matching. A person makes every judgement: which input is stock, what ratio applies, whether the evidence is enough. The rules and the register sit with a foundation whose board has a majority from outside.
The Draft Rules
The methodology is at version 0.1. It is a working draft under an open licence, with fifteen questions still open for a working group. Read it, and tell us where it is wrong.
Read the draftJoin the list
Tell us who you are. We write when the first statement is on the register.