Starbursts are the most efficient producers of metals in the Universe at low redshifts. They produce enough energy to drive outflows of material from their disks. This makes them important objects to study in order to understand the chemical evolution not only of the interstellar medium (ISM) in the starburst galaxies themselves, but also of the intergalactic medium (IGM) in their vicinity. However, several key quantities of starbursts that are needed as input to models of their ISM are still ill-constrained. Some of these critical parameters are e.g. the metal abundances of hot ionized gas, the ionization state of warm ionized gas, the amount of energy deposited into the ambient by a starburst, the efficiency of its conversion into mechanical energy and thus the total kinetic energy of the star formation-driven outflows and their kinematics. The latter are important when considering under which circumstances matter energized by a starburst will reach the so-called ‘blowout’ condition, i.e. supersede the threshold energy starting at which local energy injection into the ISM can drive an outflow first into the halo (where metal re-distribution might be very efficient) and eventually out into intergalactic space. I will discuss here a few of these quantities, how we can measure them better than in the past, and in which way some of our observing techniques need to be improved in order to obtain better constraints from the data.