Introduction, Danish Environmental Protection Agency

Ecospace Audit - An input Analysis for Products

Introduction

The OECD report on Eco-Efficiency of 1998 clearly shows that in many cases the pressure on the environment from production has decreased in a relative sense. Emissions have decreased per dollar GDP or per dollar of product output. In absolute terms, however, the pressures have often increased. Development in industrialised countries will need to go in the opposite direction: increased quality combined with an absolute decrease in resource use.

Proposals for indicators at the company level from the business community are pointing in another direction. Their indicators mainly deal with relative efficiency improvements. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development, for example, in collaboration with the World Environment Council and the Canadian National Roundtable on the Environment and the Economy propose two eco-efficiency indicators: an index measuring resource productivity for materials and energy, or possibly two indices, one for materials and one for energy; and an index tracking pounds of toxic releases per product, with the releases weighted by toxicity. (White, 1997)

At the Continuous Improvement site of the EPE (European Partners for the Environment) a warning was issued that many environmental managers just wish to polish their management systems and forget about how to get environmental pressure from their company down to a sustainable level. "Green paper tigers evolving from traditional quality management thinking will not deliver the results needed for sustainable development".

There exists a general apprehension among environmental NGOs that the current practice of eco-efficiency indicators will only be helpful for companies to claim a greener image by showing their relative increases in efficiency of for example 1-2% per year. Relative increases of 1-2% per year in efficiency do lead to a lower impact on the environment than without any progress in that area, but do not lead towards sustainable production and consumption patterns. Efficiency increases of 1-2% per year are a basic prerequisite for many businesses to stay competitive. Real eco-efficiency also includes reducing ‘to a level in line with the earth’s estimated carrying capacity’ (the less well known part of the WBCSD definition of eco-efficiency). In that case, an average efficiency increase of 4-5% per year is a more likely challenge.

The input audit seeks to broaden the scope of current environmental monitoring and management perspectives by helping companies in assessing, as far as it is possible, sustainable limits of resource use at the production level. The Ecospace Audit proposed in Chapter 3 builds on existing efforts of resource monitoring and ISO-14001 but goes beyond those mechanisms. Before doing so we will ask ourselves the question whether we are at all able to determine a sustainability level for companies.

"Systems thinking tells us that sustainability cannot be defined for a single corporation: instead, it must be defined for a complete economic-social-ecological system, not for its component parts. (...) Paul Hawken in ‘The Ecology of Commerce’,

Accepting this, however, does not at all mean that companies cannot set out a course towards sustainable production. If we accept that sustainable consumption is a possibility, then it should be possible to develop guidelines for the input level of goods and services at the company level as well.
This paper tries to explore the boundaries of these problems. Can we set relevant targets at the company level that help companies to develop their production and marketing in a more sustainable direction? The outcome of this paper suggests we can.

In Chapter 3 an initial proposal for guidance towards sustainable levels of resource use at the company level is presented. This Ecospace Audit is presented as a guide to help companies to gain knowledge on the inputs into their products and processes, to help analyse their sustainability challenge in a meaningful way and to stimulate processes to improve products and production (redesign) and if necessary to shift to completely new solutions (rethink). The quantitative analysis is meant as a tool for this process and is not meant as a goal in itself. The input reduction targets are providing helpful guidance but should not be seen as a precise and final answer to what constitutes a sustainable product. It can certainly not be applied to prove that one existing product is better than the other. Detailed comparisons between similar products becomes less interesting when we realise that most products and services need to be dematerialised substantially in the coming decades in order to contribute to sustainable development as is discussed in depth in Chapters 1 and 2.

In Chapter 4 the main strengths and weaknesses, conclusions and proposals for continued work are presented.