Integrating environmental strategies into industrial competitiveness

Competing commercially using eco-efficiency
Using ecoefficiency indicators to improve corporate environmental performance

Description

Eco-efficiency indicators are designed to be used primarily by business to monitor and report their performance. They are equally relevant to similar operations operated by government. Eco-efficiency indicators relate economic and environmental performance to each other. On the micro level they allow managers to take better decisions and enable stakeholders to assess their companies more accurately. On the macro level they allow to measure the entire economy's progress in creating value with fewer resources and less environmental burden.

Context

Technology and innovation have key roles to play in attenuating the link between economic growth and environmental degradation. Countries have a shared interest in strengthening the development and diffusion of cleaner technologies and environmentally-sound products. Provided that prices are set appropriately, there may be opportunities to reap major cost savings, enhance efficiencies in resource use, reduce pollutant emissions and waste generation, and establish cleaner and safer workplaces by encouraging enterprises to incorporate environmental objectives into their management strategies and stimulate investment in clean technologies.

Claim

The ultimate goal of eco-efficiency is to grow economies qualitatively – in other words to provide more value rather than to transform materials and energy into more waste.

Counter-claim

Eco-efficiency may be a pragmatic tool for the decoupling of resource use and value creation, but does not include social, ethical and local accountability issues.

Eco-efficiency is an outwardly admirable and certainly well-intended concept, but, unfortunately, it is not a strategy for success over the long term, because it does not reach deep enough. It works within the same system that caused the problem in the first place, slowing it down with moral proscriptions and punitive demands. It presents little more than an illusion of change. Relying on eco-efficiency to save the environment will in fact achieve the opposite – it will let industry finish off everything quietly, persistently, and completely (William McDonough and Michael Braungart).