Eco-Efficiency Creating More Value with Less Impact
DEDICATED TO MAKING A DIFFERENCE
eco-efficiency creating more value with less impact
foreword
In 1991, we in the then Business Council for Sustainable Development were looking for a single concept, perhaps a single word, to sum up the business end of sustainable development. Finding no such concept on the lexicographer s shelf, we decided we would have to launch an expression. After a contest and much agonizing, we came up with eco-efficiency. In simplest terms, it means creating more goods and services with ever less use of resources, waste and pollution. After only a decade, eco-efficiency is everywhere. I just now did a web search on one search engine, which offered me 6,149 more web sites about eco-efficiency. Today, universities teach it; consulting companies charge you to tell you how to do it; organizations like UNEP and the OECD hold conferences about it. This shows that the world very much needs the concept of eco-efficiency. And I am pleased that it is an open, expanding, evolving concept. Also, it is right and satisfactory that much of the opening up of the concept has been at the hands of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This report, in an admirably few pages (in other words extremely eco-efficiently) wraps up a decade of Council work on the topic. It shows how what began as a concept has become a sharp tool for better business performance. It is the eco-efficiency metrics approach – putting numbers on the concept – that makes it useful to business. In a year-long pilot test of eco-efficiency indicators in 23 companies, it has passed the acid test of business practicality. Now eco-efficiency needs more government attention. The concept is so obvious you would think every company in the world would seize it and milk it. Use less of the things you must buy – like resources – and produce less of the things you may get fined or sued for – like pollution – and you must make more money! Correct? Not always. Not when
eco-efficiency creating more value with less impact
foreword
In 1991, we in the then Business Council for Sustainable Development were looking for a single concept, perhaps a single word, to sum up the business end of sustainable development. Finding no such concept on the lexicographer s shelf, we decided we would have to launch an expression. After a contest and much agonizing, we came up with eco-efficiency. In simplest terms, it means creating more goods and services with ever less use of resources, waste and pollution. After only a decade, eco-efficiency is everywhere. I just now did a web search on one search engine, which offered me 6,149 more web sites about eco-efficiency. Today, universities teach it; consulting companies charge you to tell you how to do it; organizations like UNEP and the OECD hold conferences about it. This shows that the world very much needs the concept of eco-efficiency. And I am pleased that it is an open, expanding, evolving concept. Also, it is right and satisfactory that much of the opening up of the concept has been at the hands of the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD). This report, in an admirably few pages (in other words extremely eco-efficiently) wraps up a decade of Council work on the topic. It shows how what began as a concept has become a sharp tool for better business performance. It is the eco-efficiency metrics approach – putting numbers on the concept – that makes it useful to business. In a year-long pilot test of eco-efficiency indicators in 23 companies, it has passed the acid test of business practicality. Now eco-efficiency needs more government attention. The concept is so obvious you would think every company in the world would seize it and milk it. Use less of the things you must buy – like resources – and produce less of the things you may get fined or sued for – like pollution – and you must make more money! Correct? Not always. Not when