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ECO-EFFICIENCY and SUFFICIENCY |
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SUFFICIENCY
The first broad concept is sufficiency. Sufficiency considers the environmental and lifestyle implications of options, not just products, for sustainably meeting your needs. This involves re-assessing your needs and refusing what you consider to be excessive consumption -- a simpler material lifestyle, if you like. You could share a lawnmower or newspaper with your neighbour. You might prefer to carpool or catch a bus instead of driving.Although sufficiency is a personal choice, what we consider to be achievable, acceptable and attractive is influenced by our culture. These days a high level of consumption, standard of living or gross domestic product are often equated with quality of life and personal happiness. But does the equation hold true?
ECO-EFFICIENCY
The second tool has many names, let's call it eco-efficiency. Since the industrial revolution we have acted to improve labour efficiency. Being eco-efficient is about not wasting resources and reducing pollution.CLOSING LOOPS
A typical production and consumption system extracts resources, consumes them and throws 'away' what's left over. We extract more, to consume more, to dump more. It's a linear system and each year it's accelerating.Is this sustainable? The earth is big, but it's a 'closed' system with a finite carrying capacity. It's highly probable the footprint of industrial and emerging industrial economies will increase. If emerging economies were to consume as we do, resource use would increase eight-fold while their population will only double. For example, the World Bank estimates that by 2010 there will be one billion cars on the planet, with a large proportion of them in China. Estimates suggest that these cars will double current levels of energy use, smog precursors and greenhouse emissions.
This illustrates another barrier to eco-efficiency, namely 'externalities'. In a market economy, car producers consider an increase in car production as 'efficient' in dollar terms since their 'external' production costs -- i.e., polluted air, greenhouse gases and loss of non-renewable resources -- are borne by everyone.
Including externalities and closing 'loops' in production, consumption and waste are key components of eco-efficiency. The Waste Management Association of Australia estimates that Australian virgin resource extraction and processing industries receive an annual $13.7 billion public subsidy in the form of tax con-cessions. As long as waste disposal, pollution, resource loss and ecological degradation remain external costs there are no incentives for industry to treat sustainability as a 'core business function'.
Closing loops uses cradle-to-cradle thinking to turn 'waste' into 'new' products and creates product lifecycles from linear systems.
Recycling
Let's have a closer look at just one externality -- waste. What about recycling? Isn't recycling all about using things again -- closing loops? Or is it? Next time you're at the supermarket, have a look for yourself and see if the products you buy are made from 'recycled' materials, and if so, are they cost-competitive? Do you buy the same amount of recycled goods as you put in the recycling bin at home? If not, why not?Since the 1950s mass produced items such as TVs, toasters, furniture and batteries have been designed to become obsolete and then discarded. It has become cheaper to buy new than face repair costs. Yet it is technically possible to develop televisions in such a way that at least 98 percent of the materials used could be recovered with the aim of making more TVs. As technology advances, new models emerge. It's highly likely that the new computer you buy today has been superseded by another 'latest model'. Do we have to buy new every couple of years and condemn the old to landfill? Upgradable computers have been designed -- why don't we see them in the shops?
DESIGN FOR ECO-EFFICIENCY
Many products contain non-renewable or hazardous materials. The metals used in computers and electrical goods are often the result of environmentally and socially destructive mining practices. The back of your TV's glass screen is coated in lead. Rechargable batteries in mobile phones contain cadmium. Fluorescent light tubes hold mercury dust. Insecticide spray cans contain residual carcinogens. Isn't it smarter to avoid the risk these products may pose from cradle to grave?You're probably familiar with products that have been redesigned as 'environmentally friendly'. Fridges are now CFC-free, and energy efficient models are available and labelled -- but they still end up in landfills. Can fridges be conceived in a 'cradle-to-cradle' way? The figures below outline some options that might work to prevent waste and use resources efficiently.
In Europe, Japan and the US, spent rechargable nickel-cadmium batteries are collected and reprocessed to reclaim cadmium for more batteries, and nickel for steelmaking. Products are redesigned (figure 1) so that spent batteries can be removed. The product system (figure 2) has also changed so that now when you buy a replacement battery, you take back the old one. Producers collect them from retailers for reprocessing. The price of a new battery includes a 'point of sale' fee for waste management, which is about 1-2 percent of the battery cost.
Figure 1 A range of design options exist that along with 'sufficiency', form the building blocks of waste prevention and sustainable consumption.
Figure 2 We can take a product, and design it eco-efficiently. Or we can ask a more fundamental question: which product or service would best serve a certain need? We often buy services, not products. Do you buy a television to own 4000 chemicals, half a kilogram of lead and an explosive vacuum tube, or for the information it brings? If we re-align our thinking the economy can follow. If you lease your TV, the producer may be interested in ensuring its ongoing maintainence. Unlike conventional sales exchanges between retailers and customers, 'products of service' create business opportunities via a series of longer term hire / repair / upgrade / trade-in / finance relationships.
WHO SHOULD BE RESPONSIBLE FOR WASTE?
Local councils are currently responsible for household recycling. In a closed loop system the bottles and papers we recycle at home are sold by local councils to producers to be re-made into more bottles and papers. But the market for recycled materials is unstable, prices are often low and raw materials are often cheaper than recycled ones. Local councils also have little control over the quality of recycled materials as 'co-mingled' recycling means that 'clean' items such as office paper are 'contaminated' with items such as newspaper, glossy magazines and tetrapaks. Some of our recycled waste can only be sold overseas.Industry isn't paying its way with current recycling and councils have to subsidise kerbside recycling by $90 million each year. And what about items that go to landfill such as computers, white goods, old paint, household chemicals, batteries and polystyrene packaging?
Recycling or garbage: to throw or not to throw -- is that the question?
Local councils have limited options for 'closing loops' because they have little influence over what a product will look like in the garbage. Your council rates pay for your waste but the choices you make in the supermarket or on garbage night aren't included in your bill. Producers aren't responsible for the environmental and financial costs of managing their product's waste and there's little incentive to be eco-efficient as the principles of user-pays or polluter-pays aren't applied.
WHY PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY?
Producers, product designers, retailers and advertisers control the appearance, performance, contents, packaging and purpose of products. They organise how products arrive at the supermarket and devise advertising strategies yet don't consider what happens to the product once you've bought and used it. But manufacturers could provide the means not only to avoid waste by considering how natural resources, renewable raw materials, or non-hazardous materials are used, but also design products to allow reuse and recovery.EPR around the globe
Eighteen members of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development are actively pushing for EPR. In 1991, Germany passed a packaging ordinance that gave industry and trade the responsibility for managing post consumer packaging waste. In October 1996, the 'Eco-Cycle Law' gave EPR to companies that develop, manufacture, process, or market products in Germany. Similar systems now operate in France, Austria, Belgium, Sweden and some US states for a range of products, including electrical goods, packaging, cars, paints and batteries.WHO PAYS? . . .
Extending producer responsibility to the end of a product's life 'closes a loop' of responsibility, and allows feedback between waste problems and those with the greatest potential to prevent them -- producers.If producers were responsible for waste, some of the costs would be built into the price of products and we would pay for waste management in our role as consumers of waste-generating goods, rather than as taxpayers or ratepayers. This creates incentives for waste prevention and might even generate a greater number of options for sustainable consumption.
. . . USER PAYS
RETOOLING: BEYOND POLLUTION PREVENTION
Although EPR will extend producer responsibility to the waste stage of a product's life, environmental impacts arise throughout its lifecycle. As a rule of thumb, for every tonne of post-consumer waste, five tonnes of waste lie at the resource extraction stage. And there's more to it than simply volumes of waste. For example, to produce the wheat for one loaf of bread by conventional agriculture can result in the loss of 9 kilos of soil through soil erosion. And there are other effects when we use a product. For example, various life cycle assessments of a car agree that between 70 and 95 percent of its environmental impacts happen during use, not production or disposal.We all need to retool our approach to sustainable consumption. Some of the tools that government and producers have are right here in the environmental management toolbox. We can use these tools to identify environmental impacts at strategic points in a product's lifecycle and develop policies, legislation and practice around the products we use.
FOR MORE INFORMATION
The resource guide will guide you to further information on EPR and the management tools above. Read these accompanying case studies for some examples and applications of EPR:
Household hazardous wastes
Reusable transport packaging
Electronics, appliances and information technology
WHAT CAN I DO?
- Government policy and industry practice need to become more reflective of sustainable systems. But how can our message for producer responsibility have any credibility if we don't practice consumer responsibility? Here are a few things you can do.
Tell your retailers and producers where they fall short, and why. Use some of the phone hotlines available -- you'll find details in the resource guide under 'consumer'. Or write direct to the producer -- contact FOE Sydney for some ideas or download the sample letters soon to appear on this website.
Consider participating in, or establishing an alternative, such as a bulk-buy co-operative or a reuse and repair centre -- you'll find details in the resource sheet under 'consumer'.
Develop your own personal code of buying ethics, or get involved in the Friends of the Earth ethical buyers' guide, which showcases a range of companies and the products they produce.
ENVIRONMENTAL MANAGEMENT TOOLBOX
life cycle analysis or assessment
Extending Producer Responsibility
cleaner production
industrial ecology
environmental impact assessment
ecological tax reform
environmental space with equity
ecological footprint analysis
THIS PROJECT HAS BEEN ASSISTED BY THE NEW SOUTH WALES GOVERNMENT THROUGH ITS WASTE PLANNING AND MANAGEMENT FUND'S WASTE REDUCTION PROGRAM. THE OPINIONS EXPRESSED IN THIS MATERIAL DO NOT NECESSARILY REFLECT THE POLICIES OF THE NSW GOVERNMENT.