Environmental Project, 980 – Prioritisation within the integrated product policy

Prioritisation within The Integrated Product Policy

Preface

Project objectives and target groups
Project organisation

Project objectives and target groups

The main objectives of the project was to:

Establish a detailed and well-documented method for prioritising product areas and product groups where Danish measures will provide most environmental improvement. The data basis shall be easy to maintain and update, so that it can be used in future prioritisation as well.
Apply the developed method on products that are currently used in Denmark (own production as well as imported products) and on products that are currently produced in Denmark (export-products), at a level of detail justified by the method, and hereby establish a prioritised list of product areas and product groups where Danish measures will have largest importance for the environment.

In addition, the project has:

Analysed the prioritised product groups with the aim of identifying new product groups suited for environmental labelling.
Further analysed and presented the project results in the areas covered by the four product panels (agriculture/foods, electronics, retail trade and textiles).
Further developed the project's database, to increase its applicability as a Danish reference-database for life cycle assessment. This includes an addition of physical units where possible, and a further disaggregation of selected product groups.

The primary target group of the project is decision makers in ministries and business organisations that are going to prioritise and organise future product-oriented activities.

The project furthermore provides data and tools applicable for everyone who performs lifecycle assessments of products produced and/or used in Denmark.

Project organisation

The project has been carried out by a project group from:

2.-0 LCA consultants (Bo Weidema, Anne Merete Nielsen, Per Nielsen, Kim Christiansen, Greg Norris, Pippa Notten),
CML, Leiden Universitet (Sangwon Suh), and
Pré Consultants (Jacob Madsen, Chris de Gelder).

Bo Weidema, 2.-0 LCA consultants, has acted as project manager.

Niels Frees from the Danish LCA Centre has contributed to Chapter 7.

An advisory expert group, with participation of

Göran Finnveden, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Ole Gravgård Pedersen, Danmarks Statistik,
Michael Hauschild, Technical University of Denmark,
Trine Susanne Jensen, National Environmental Research Institute (DMU),
Henri Moll, Groningen University,
José Potting, Groningen University,
Anders Schmidt, dk-TEKNIK,
Mette Wier, Institute of Local Government Studies (AKF), now the Danish Research Institute of Food Economics,

has, as part of the project, participated in an International Invitational Expert Seminar (Nielsen et al. 2003a), commented the model proposals from the working group in their specific areas of expertise, before their implementation, commented on the final model and the results of the preliminary prioritisations, and evaluated the project results in terms of the relevance and flexibility of the developed prioritisation model and the completeness of the delivered documentation.

The project has been supervised by a reference group with participation of:

Mariane Hounum, Danish Environmental Protection Agency (chair),
John Egholm Jensen, Danish Environmental Protection Agency,
Lone Lykke Nielsen, Danish Environmental Protection Agency,
Susanne Kofoed, Danish Agricultural Council,
Ole Dall, COWI.