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 the entire life cycle to a level at least in line with the Earth's estimated carrying capacity.”

While ecoefficiency can be applied to existing products in a gradual or incremental manner, ecoeffectiveness seeks to redesign products and manufacturing processes from the bottom up with total sustainability as the primary consideration. It involves new ways of thinking, a change of mindset, and new design paradigms, not simply an adjustment to business as usual. Ecoeffectiveness, if widely adopted, would represent a new industrial revolution.

Traditional industrial production views manufacturing as a one-way flow from source to disposal, from cradle-to-grave, while ecoeffective production aims for a circular flow from cradle-back-to-cradle. Examples of ideal ecoeffectiveness include waste discharged from factories that is cleaner than the water that entered the factory, buildings that produce more energy than they use, and products that are not discarded when they are no longer useful but are fed back into production cycles.

The concept of ecoeffectiveness was developed by William McDonough and Michael Braungart in their book, Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things. McDonough and Braungart use natural systems as their model for industrial ecoeffectiveness. In nature, the waste of one species becomes the food of another, and nutrients flow indefinitely in cycles of birth, decay, and rebirth. In nature there is no waste. This provides the basis for one of their key principles: “waste equals food.”

[Page 152]In industry, products can be made of natural materials that biodegrade when they reach the end of their useful life and can be composted so they return their nutrients to the soil. McDonough and Braungart refer to such materials as “biological nutrients.” Alternatively, if they are made from synthetic materials, safe and nontoxic materials should be used so that they can be reused to make other useful products. These are called “technical nutrients,” and feed into industrial closed-loop cycles, just as “biological nutrients” feed into nature's cycles.

Recycling tends to be economically inefficient because the materials degrade each time they are used and can require large amounts of energy to be reused. For example, steel has to be melted down and becomes weaker in the process. However the aim of ecoeffectiveness is to use materials that can be reused forever without these drawbacks.

Ecoeffective production would utilize renewable energy sources, such as solar and wind power, rather than those that consume coal, gas, or oil, or have dangerous by-products, such as nuclear power.

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