The tasks of environmental management and engineering are manifold. Computer-based environmental information systems and tools need to gather data and provide information for life cycle assessments, eco-balances, environmental management systems, environmental risk assessments, eco-efficiency analyses, and so on. So far, no single approach serves all the different purposes. This paper elaborates the potential of material and energy flow networks to become an underlying concept for the various tasks of environmental management and engineering. The paper states that 'hybrid material flow analysis', a component-based advancement of material flow analysis, allows to integrate both, the data processing and the modelling perspective of environmental information systems and tools.