Material Stock Accounting/Analysis（MSA）is the one of the emerging areas, which aims to capture the situation of the material accumulation in our society. Material stocks should be one of our main objects of management, in the sense both of resource and waste management in the future. In this paper, 1）the importance of studies associated with material stocks is discussed; 2）the types and categorizations of material stocks are reviewed; 3）the methodologies for estimating material stocks and their characteristics are summarized; and 4）the recent studies in the area are reviewed with potential applications of the MSA results. We found out increasing number of outcomes from MSA studies, though more detailed analysis will lead to more detailed and useful applications.
