Professor Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek (1932 – 2019) was founder and Director of the Factor 10 Institute and Honorary President of the World Resources Forum. From 1992 to 1997 together with Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker he headed the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy.
Schmidt-Bleek is considered an authority on the topics of “resource productivity” and “dematerialization”. In 1994 he came up with the concept of the “Ecological rucksack” and in 1998 he developed the unit Material-Input per Service Unit (MIPS) as a measure for the assessment of environmental impacts of a product. Schmidt-Bleek is author of numerous books and publications. He was member of the Lindau Group.