Ecospace Audit - An input Analysis for Products
Preface
Since the beginning of the ’90s the concept of environmental space (ES) has been presented in 30 European countries by the Sustainable Europe Campaign of Friends of the Earth Europe and affiliated environmental organisations. Various people have expressed interest in the concept of ES and the need to measure progress towards sustainability at the company level. Besides general notions of more environmentally sound production processes no clear answers exist to the question how ES translates into specific, concrete, measurable and transparent demands at the company level. There is no practical method available to apply the ES concept at the company level.
To this end Friends of the Earth Netherlands has developed the project "Environmental space audit for companies: developing a practical method". The project has received funding from the Danish government, which has adopted the ES concept as a benchmarking principle for their environmental policies. The project started at the end of 1997 and ended in March 1999. In the development process a lot has been learnt, involving forerunner-persons from companies (but not representing an organisation) and (NGO) experts from the beginning in that process.
The following people took part in the project as members of the advisory committee of this project:
 | John Elkington, SustainAbility, United Kingdom |
| Nick Robins, IIED, United Kingdom |
| Christa Liedtke, Wuppertal Institute, Germany |
| Irina Maslennikova, Xerox Europe, United Kingdom |
| Giacomo Elias, Agricultural Faculty of the University of Milan |
| Chris Dutilh, Unilever, the Netherlands |
This paper is the end result of an interesting project that has sought to define the strengths and limitations of:
| monitoring resource use at the company level; |
| setting resource use (reduction) targets at the company level on the basis of environmental space reflections; |
| redefining product/service concepts over the whole life cycle at the company level in a sustainable society with 10 billion consumers globally; |
| developing concrete guidelines for practical use of the concept of environmental space at the company level. |
The test presented in this document should be considered as a work in progress. It has,
however, been thoroughly tested with the help of two leading companies. Xerox Europe in
the United Kingdom is the European arm of Xerox Corporation, producer of copiers,
printers, scanners, faxes and other solutions for document transfer.
David Foley, Environmental Researcher at Xerox Europe applied the Ecospace Audit to a
Xerox DC 220/230 combined printer/scanner/fax/copier. Valuable comments and support were
also given by Irina Maslennikova, Environmental Manager and Hugh A. Smith, Manager, Joint
Venture Operations & Environment, Health & Safety Manufacturing & Supply
Chain.
Ecover Belgium NV is a Belgian producer of ecologically produced detergents based on
natural ingredients. Peter Malaise, Concept Manager at Ecover, applied the test to Ecover
and gave many useful comments.
Valuable comments were also received from Fenny Eshuis of the Max Havelaar Foundation, the Netherlands and Teo Wams, Director of Friends of the Earth Netherlands.
We are very grateful to all these people for their contributions to this report. Nevertheless, any shortcomings are the responsibility of the authors.