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Green Technology Foresight about environmentally friendly products and materials Summary and recommendations
The objectives of the projectThe objectives of the Green Technology Foresight project have been:
Recommendations integrating future environmental and innovative aspects of ICT-, bio- and nanotechnologyThe development within the three technology areas hitherto and the identified probable future trends introduce issues concerning environmental potentials and risks, including potentials and risks related to use, wastes and emissions of hazardous substances and materials. The following recommendations aim at high quality environmental governance in the development of the three areas, so that issues of societal needs and environmental potentials and risks are addressed within planning and management of research, innovation and technology applications. The developed recommendations are structured within the headlines A. Environmental governance B. Guiding research and research policy C. Policy support for eco-innovation D. Regulating application areas The recommendations suggest roles to a broad variety of stakeholders, like research and innovation institutions, businesses and business organisations, governmental authorities, and consumer and environmental non-governmental organisations. The Ministry of Environment and Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation are seen as important governmental authorities in the planning of the implementation of the recommendations. A. Environmental governanceStrengthen the environmental governance in relation to ICT-, bio- and nanotechnology General proposals: A1. Strengthened environmental governance should aim at
A2. Strengthened environmental governance calls upon
Economic support is needed for Danish researchers’, governmental authorities’, and NGO’s continued national and international networking around experiences with environmental governance in relation to the three technology areas. A3. Supplementary proposals concerning environmental governance within the three technology areas: ICT: There is a need for continued discussions about the environmental aspects of ICT and how they are shaped in interaction with societal trends like globalisation, more intense everyday life etc. This is also important as ICT technology in the future might get embedded into many new products like textiles etc. Such discussions should enable analyses that get deeper than the metaphor of ‘the knowledge society’ as very knowledgeable and only having limited resource consumption. Biotechnology: There is need for more public participation in the shaping of the future research and innovation strategies for white biotechnology. This should ensure discussions that get deeper than the metaphor of white biotechnology as a ‘clean technology’ in itself, because it is based on biological materials and processes. Nanotechnology: There are rising public, governmental and scientific concerns about how nanotechnology may lead to new types of health and environment risks because of new types of materials and processes with new characteristics. Environmental risks have hitherto been neglected to a high degree in the nano community. Since nanotechnologies could undergo much change the next 5-10 years there is need for ongoing dialogues highlighting trends, visions and fears. Nanotechnology comprises many different scientific fields why there is a need for discussions focusing on the different types of nanotechnology. B. Guiding research and research policy:Stronger integration of environmental aspects in the guidance of research and research policy General proposals: B1. It is suggested to develop
B2. Supplementary proposals for guiding research and research policy within the three technology areas: ICT: There is need for more knowledge about the role of ICT-based tools and technologies in the shaping of eco-efficient use patterns and in environmental management in order to develop more socio-technically based development strategies and paradigms for ICT-technologies. This includes:
Biotechnology: More knowledge about the environmental aspects of biotechnology seems to be one of the prerequisites for future application of these technologies. This includes:
Nanotechnology: The key barrier to nano eco-innovation is the lacking awareness and knowledge of nano-related eco-potentials and business potentials. It is difficult to get environmental funding for fundamental nano research, since this kind of funding tends to focus on more mature and immediate solutions. There is need for:
C. Support for eco-innovationSupport eco-innovation based on pre-commercial technologies with environmental potentials General proposals: C1. Support for eco-innovation should be organised through
C2. Launch a Danish Green Innovation programme focused on key environmental themes and key product and consumption areas
C3. Strengthen the role of environmental concerns in the further development of ETAP The Danish government should encourage and support
C4. Supplementary proposals for eco-innovation within the three technology areas: ICT: There is a need for more focus on the potentials and limits to intelligent products and applications and sensors as elements in an eco-efficiency strategy. Furthermore, there is a need for strategies to ensure focus on hazardous substances and materials and radiation in the development of products and components:
Biotechnology: There is a need for development of enzymes with eco-potentials for a broader variety of industrial processes. Furthermore, there is also a need for a strategy for the use of bio-mass as renewable resource:
Nanotechnology: There is a need for considerations about how the industrial up-take of nanoscience can be promoted, through existing industry and through new start-ups. A central barrier is lacking environmental competencies in the Danish nano community and lacking nano competencies among environmental experts and industry and the weak linkages between these groups:
D. Regulating application areasRemove barriers to the dissemination of technology applications with environmental potentials General proposal: D1.Where mature and market introduced technologies with environmental potentials are not taken up by potential users, sector and product domain regulation should make present market, production and user regimes more environmentally oriented. D2. Specific proposals for regulation of application areas in realation to the three technology areas: ICT:
Biotechnology:
Nanotechnology:
Analysis and findings in relation to ICTThe term ICT (information and communications technology) is describing the tools and the processes to access, retrieve, store, organise, manipulate, produce, present and exchange data and information by electronic and other automated means. ICT is an umbrella term that includes any communication device or application, encompassing: radio, television, cellular phones, computer and network hardware and software, satellite systems and so on, as well as the various services and applications associated with them, such as videoconferencing and distance learning. The aim of the research has been:
The analysis is based on desk research, interviews and workshops. The desk research has focused on former research and knowledge about the relationship between ICT and the environment in a wider perspective so the relation between ICT and the society has been a significant part of the desk research. The interviews have been carried out with actors from both Danish research environment and business using ICT as tool in their work. The actors have to a high degree been selected due to a relation to use of chemicals, materials or energy resources and not because of their specific interest and work with environmental issues. The ICT research and development has in a high degree been left to the private business in Denmark, which in 2001 constituted 90 percent of the total research and development within the ICT-area. The ICT sector in Denmark can be characterised by the following business and research related strengths:
An important trend for more integrated and distributed software based services and less visible and smaller products and computer equipments will include some of the following developments:
The relationship between ICT and the environment can be illustrated by ordering the impacts at three different levels. The first order relationships between ICT and the environment are the direct environmental impact from the ICT equipment and ICT infrastructure, i.e. the use of resources and the environmental impact from extraction of raw materials, manufacture, operation, and disposal of ICT equipment and infrastructure. The second order relationships between ICT and the environment are the environmental impacts related to the use of ICT in different applications. These relations are the most important concerning the potential substitution of processes stressing the environment, and improving the efficiency of production processes etc. The third order relationships between ICT and environment are the consequences of changes in the societies’ total use of resources through changes in the magnitude of different business and product areas. This type of impact is represented in the possible parallel growth in e.g. the access to information and the consumption of material goods and transportation. This level of impact also includes social and structural changes in production and consumption resulting from the implementation of ICT almost everywhere. Five application fields with relevance for environmental aspects have been analysed: a) Improving environmental knowledge, b) Design of products and processes, c) Process regulation and control, d) Intelligent products and applications and e) Transport, logistics and mobility Some of the raw materials essential to modern electronics like copper, tin, silver, gold and platinum are based on scarce resources. Of the materials used in the manufacturing of ICT-equipment only two percent ends up in the product itself. The functionality of a number of typical ICT-product is continuously expanding, which implies means an increase in materials – and energy consumption. There are potentials for environmental improvements from the use of ICT-based tools and devices for data collection and processing, information exchange, product and process design, and process regulation and control. More data processing capacity enables the processing of more data and more complex calculations. Some tools aim at more general resource efficiency. It is the aim of the application by the user that determines whether environmental achievements are in focus. The integration of electronic components into products, so-called intelligent products or pervasive computing, shows environmental potentials related to automatic optimisation of the function of products, operational feedback to the user, digital product information about maintenance, reuse etc., integration of products into digital networks whereby use might take place during low load cycles of the electricity supply, and digital upgradeable products. Telework, e-business and logistics are those ICT applications with the most implications for transport behaviour in the future. A limited amount of employees will be able to telework. Telework might imply that regular transport related to commuting and shopping in certain hours is replaced by more differentiated transport needs. This could challenge the existing infrastructure of public transport and strengthen individual transport solutions. Mobile telework will be more widespread as mobile communication solutions will offer the same facilities at comparable costs as those offered from the office. This may cause an increase in business travel transport due to the ongoing globalisation of manufacturing and trade. Within freight transport e-business could lead to more transport of small batches with high urgency to professional and private customers. The concept of just-in-time production in industry will also imply more transport due to the request for more frequent supply of small batches of materials and products. Logistic tools might optimise the amount of transportation within these organisational and economic conditions. The identified environmental potentials within the five areas of application play today no significant role in the development and use of software and ICT-equipment. Achievements within these fields demand environmental regulation of the respective application areas influencing the priorities made by the users and the dominant driving forces for innovations and implementations. An increased amount of electronic products, miniaturisation of products and a more dispersed use of sensors and other devices could imply increasing problems in the future with electronic waste. Increased use of pervasive computing might cause health problems due to electro-smog and safety problems due to interference between different devices operating in wireless networks. Efficient implementation of the EU directive about hazardous substances in relation to electronic products could imply that some toxic materials are substituted in the future and the directive concerning waste could imply increased recycling of materials from the products. Analysis and findings in relation to biotechnologyNew biotechnology has, in addition to coming out in most, if not all, national foresights in the last 25-30 years as important for future techno-economic growth, also for the last 25-30 years been envisioned to have a number of environmental advantages, both with regard to remediation as well as to offering more sustainable production. The aim of the research has been:
From the 1990s and in the 2000s an increasing number of reports have specifically addressed the environmental perspectives in new biotechnology development, and in many cases addressed specific applications of new biotechnology. These envisioned applications have distinguished themselves from the pharmaceutical and medical applications of new biotechnology and from the application of new biotechnology in agriculture, and focussed on new biotechnology for industrial sustainability, monitoring and remediation. With background in these reports, the survey of new environmental biotechnology in Denmark has been delimited and focussed mainly on white biotechnology and on other areas, in which new biotechnology has been perceived as having environmental advantages, namely the areas of:
This delimitation means that only a part of the Danish biotechnology activities have been addressed. As the white biotechnology in general and in Denmark in particular is dominated by enzyme technology and the companies Novozymes A/S and Danisco A/S, the research and development within this area and these companies contributes largely to the foresight on white biotechnology. The environmental performance of biotechnology is not an unambiguous issue. The mere fact that biological resources are degradable and of biological origin is not in itself an indication that biotechnology is environmentally superior to its alternatives. It is emphasized that any environmental assessment of a technology is a comparison to alternative pathways to provide the services in question, and that the alternative is most often is a well matured technology having had a long period of time to achieve its level of resource efficiency. This implies that up-coming technologies have to compete with matured ones, and often there has to be some kind of bottleneck to be broken for the up-coming alternative to be competitive. In the case of biotechnology, one such breaking of bottleneck is, of course, the genetic modification of micro-organisms implying huge efficiency increases of biotechnology, and there is no doubt what-so-ever that this will lead to the fact that bio-technology gains a lot of land from conventional chemical synthesis and products of petrochemical origin. An essential characteristic of biotechnology is the heavy increase in process efficiency of fermentation. This leads in itself to benefits in terms of resource savings and related environmental impacts from the manufacturing and use of these resources. Moreover, it rapidly renders new application areas of fermentation products economically competitive to their conventional alternatives and allows for harvesting benefits related to using fermentation products in industrial and household processes worldwide. In Denmark, enzyme technology comes out as a key technology for realisation of environmental benefits of biotechnology. It is demonstrated in the environmental assessments that enzymes in the referred cases address and reduce toxic agents, energy consumption and resource use, and references are made to representatives in the industry as well as researchers, who expect that enzymes will contribute even further by increased efficiency in production and use, by application within more industries and by further use in industries already using enzymes. Environmental aspects are referred to as potentially contributing to increase in the application of enzymes. The majority of R&D in enzyme development is being carried out in industry. R&D in this area is referred to as having sprung from massive investments in biotechnology research and in molecular biology, and from R&D in pharmaceuticals and fermentation technology. The increasing applications of enzymes in industry is, in addition to large efficiency gains obtained in recent years, also to some extent a consequence of increasing focus on environmental problems and the regulation hereof. Examples are mentioned amongst other as the development of enzymes for ethanol production (which has also been supported with large R&D resources), the development of detergent enzymes to reduce amount and temperature of water, and the development of phytase for reducing the release of phosphorus from pig production. Development is further referred to as having benefited from the support of the introduced governmental regulation as well as of technological measures to reduce health and environmental risks, to meet the concerns of trade unions and environmental organisations. With regard to developments within bio-ethanol and bio-polymers, environmental concerns have been key motivators, including concerns for fossil fuel scarcity. The environmental assessments of these areas of biotechnology, however, demonstrate a need for a more holistic evaluation of their perceived environmental advantages. Any use of biological resources may in the future have to address the fact that biological resources are of limited availability, and any environmental claim will, therefore, have to compare with alternative uses of such resources. Using arable land and agricultural crops for bio-ethanol and bio-polymers with the purpose of substituting fossil fuels, therefore, probably has to compare with using the same land and crops for substituting fossil fuels in the energy sector. With regard to the application of new biotechnology to monitoring and remediation, it has been foreseen to contribute to cleaning of a number of pollutions. An important barrier for further research as well as development has been referred to as uncertainties regarding also the negative consequences. Private research and development primarily takes place in the US; however, further research into the potential positive and negative consequences still seem a prerequisite for a debate on the acceptability and extent of application. Analysis and findings in relation to nanotechnologyNanotechnology is an emerging general purpose technology, which by many is expected to form the basis of the next industrial revolution. It is high on the political agenda. The interest and funding going into this area globally in the later years is immense; also in Denmark. As yet, however, nanotechnology is at a very early, in many cases experimental stage of development. The actual potential of nanoscience turning into nanotechnology on a wide scale is still very uncertain and predictions and claims on the future development of nanotechnology must be treated very carefully. The analysis of nanotechnology looks into:
The analysis concludes that in spite of frequent references to considerable eco-opportunities of nanotechnology in the general debate on nanotechnology, environmental issues are only moderately, in some cases quite weakly, part of the normal problem solving activity of the Danish nano technological community. Green attention and search rules are lacking. Consequently the nano technological paths which are currently in an early but critical phase of formation are not very green. This means that eco-opportunities are neglected and environmental risks are overlooked. Quite a wide range of potential eco-opportunities are identified none the less, though much of this research is currently not directed towards environmental applications. The potential eco-opportunities are based on some intrinsic features of nanotechnologies which may facilitate eco-innovation. Much nanotechnology offers opportunities for resource efficiency gains e.g. through being small, efficient, lighter and more durable, but also more intelligent and tailored in the application. The analysis presents 11 main nano research areas and 39 specific research areas/nanotechnologies with eco-potentials as identified by Danish nano researchers. Six of these are expanded on in case studies. Many of the suggested eco-potentials may offer novel solutions to environmental problems. The potentials remedy environmental problems in four ways: a) ‘smart tailored’ products and b) new materials with new properties, which both could enable less use of energy and other resources in the manufacturing or the use of these products and materials, c) technology for more efficient energy systems and for energy systems based on alternatives to fossil fuel (fuel cells and solar cells) and d) environmental remediation with more targeted dosing of e.g. hazardous chemicals and more targeted treatment of pollutants. The uncertainties as to the future development of these nanotechnologies are in many cases very uncertain. Also there is a lack of in-depth knowledge on both eco-opportunities and possible detrimental environmental effects. There is a rising but new concern about environmental risks related to within the Danish nano community, similarly to the global trend. Competencies and concrete studies are lacking here though, particularly concerning not only the toxicity of nano materials but research into “clean nanotechnology”, including the environmental aspects of various stages in the product life cycle. A series of barriers to obtain a stronger emphasis on environmental issues in nanotechnology development are identified, which policy should address. Some of these are:
The nanotechnology case raises important policy questions. Issues such as when and how to carry out dialogues and policy measures towards a technological field as nanotechnology whose technological materialisation in the near to medium future is highly uncertain and very diverse.
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