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According to the WBCSD definition, eco-efficiency is achieved through the delivery of "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". [6]
The reason we need value creation for eco-efficient products is threefold: the higher price in the market is required to cover the higher production cost of green products (note that a higher price is only accepted by the consumer when the perceived value is higher, otherwise the consumer will not buy the product)
It has been noted that improvements in resource efficiency can occur at production, consumption, and end of product life stages. [2] Resource efficiency measures, methods, and aims are quite similar to those of resource productivity/resource intensity and of the slightly more environmentally-inclined concept of ecological efficiency/eco-efficiency.
Ecological efficiency is a combination of several related efficiencies that describe resource utilization and the extent to which resources are converted into biomass. [ 1 ] Exploitation efficiency is the amount of food ingested divided by the amount of prey production ( I n / P n − 1 {\displaystyle I_{n}/P_{n-1}} )
Here also, depending on authors' definitions, the boundary between efficiency and sufficiency may not always be perfectly drawn. As an illustration, a report for UNEP classifies items such as reducing living spaces, driving smaller cars and car sharing as material efficiency, while they would be more traditionally viewed as sufficiency. [15]
Measurable energy conservation and efficiency gains in the 1980s led to the 1987 Energy Security Report to the President (DOE, 1987) that "the United States uses about 29 quads less energy in a year today than it would have if our economic growth since 1972 had been accompanied by the less- efficient trends in energy use we were following at ...
By incorporating eco-efficiency into design tactics, DfE takes into consideration the entire life-cycle of the product, while still making products usable but minimizing resource use. The key focus of DfE is to minimize the environmental-economic cost to consumers while still focusing on the life-cycle framework of the product. [ 3 ]
Eco-labeling standardization is a new form of regulation which is voluntary in nature but impose upon large companies market forces in order to harmonize production of goods and services with stronger ecological practices. Recently, it has turned into a new form of non-state authority at both national and international levels.