Overall, resource efficiency has improved by about 2 percent per year in industrialized countries since 1970 (though energy efficiency has barely changed since 1990) [5]. (See Industry Has Gradually Improved Its Energy Efficiency.) These gains are due to technological advances and structural economic changes such as the shift away from energy-intensive heavy industry. A key aim of eco-efficiency is to accelerate this process. (See Seven Dimensions of Eco-Efficiency.) Indeed, the Factor 10 Club, a group of prominent figures in environment and development, have called for a 10-fold increase in the average resource productivity of industrialized countries over the long term [6]. Many eco-efficiency initiatives to date have been driven by legislated pollution controls, either actual or anticipated. However, a number of companies are going beyond legal requirements and are attempting to reduce dramatically their raw material requirements and emissions through the development of “closed-loop” processing cycles in which wastes are completely recycled or reused and never enter the environment.
An eco-efficiency program established at SC Johnson Wax in 1990 has cut the company’s manufacturing waste by half, reduced virgin packaging waste by 25 percent, and reduced the use of volatile organic compounds by 16 percent; at the same time, production has increased by more than 50 percent. The company’s largest plant extracts methane gas from a nearby landfill and recaptures organic vapors from process lines to obtain one third of its energy needs; another plant continuously reuses 95 percent of its wastewater so that it is never discharged. The company has realized more than US$20 million in annual cost savings [7].
There is also a growing trend to hold companies responsible for the environmental impacts of their products and services throughout their entire life cycle, known as product stewardship. A wave of new legislation and industry-government agreements, especially in Europe, has extended the Polluter Pays Principle (which states that the polluting party should be responsible for the financial costs of mitigation or cleanup) from the manufacturing to the use and disposal phases of a product’s life. Examples of such measures include material taxes, mandatory recycling targets, and “take-back” requirements that direct manufacturers to collect and process various packaging and consumer products such as batteries, domestic appliances, and even cars at the end of their useful lives. In response, affected companies are redesigning their products by using substitutes for toxic or hazardous materials, reducing packaging, and improving recyclability.
In some cases, as with office equipment, manufacturers are turning to reconditioning or rebuilding old equipment, rather than building every new machine from scratch. Xerox, for example, has developed aggressive product return practices to recapture old copiers for reconditioning [8]. The company has found that even recycling low-value items such as toner cartridges can be profitable. In 1994, Xerox saved some US$2 million in raw material costs by reusing toner cartridges – enough to cover the costs of collecting the cartridges, including a cash incentive program to prod customers to join the recycling effort [9] [10].
Seven Dimensions of Eco-Efficiency
Eco-efficiency is achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and improve quality of life while progressively reducing environmental impacts and resource intensity throughout the life cycle to a level at least in line with the Earth’s estimated carrying capacity. There are seven key dimensions of eco-efficiency that every business should take into account when developing products, introducing process changes, or taking other actions with environmental implications. They are:
The greater the improvement in each of these dimensions – and the more dimensions in which improvement occurs – the more eco-efficient a product or process is (assuming that it also increases one’s economic welfare). Source: Livio D. DeSimone and Frank Popoff, with the World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Eco-Efficiency: The Business Link to Sustainable Development (MIT Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1997), pp. 47, 56-57. |
References and notes
5. Andrew Glyn, “Northern Growth and Environmental Constraints,” in V. Bhaskar and Andrew Glyn, eds., The North, The South: Ecological Constraints and the Global Economy (Earthscan Publications, Ltd., London, 1995), p. 49.
6. Op. cit. 4, p. 6.
7. Stephan Schmidheiny, Rodney Chase, and Livio D. DeSimone, Signals of Change (World Business Council for Sustainable Development, Geneva, 1997), p. 20.
8. Xerox’s European affiliate now recovers roughly two thirds of the 120,000 Xerox copiers discarded yearly in Europe, remanufacturing most of them and using some for spare parts.
9. Op. cit. 4, p. 75.
10. “Rank Xerox: Towards Waste-Free Products from Waste-Free Factories,” ENDS Report, Vol. 261 (October 1996), p. 19.
