Ecoeffectiveness

Ecoeffectiveness is a strategy that seeks to minimize waste, pollution, and resource use when designing and manufacturing products. The goal is to ensure that they use as few inputs—materials and energy—as possible, and that ideally their outputs become inputs for other products, making production far more sustainable.

In 1992, the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) used the term ecoefficiency to widen the term efficiency—which, in manufacturing, referred to the production of a set amount of goods for the least economic cost—to include considerations of resource usage, waste production and pollution discharge. Ecoefficiency, according to the WBCSD, seeks to produce “competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life while progressively reducing environmental impacts of goods and resource intensity throughout ...