Does the "eco-friendly" concept mean both economically and environmentally friendly?

While talking about environmental cost, people should think “environmental cost saving”.

When an organisation is not in compliance with the environmental regulation, stakeholders decisions, sectors practices and standardisation processes, then there is a real impact on competitiveness itself.

The term 'eco-efficiency' defines the combination of economic and ecological efficiency.

The concept of eco-efficiency was developed by the World Business Council of Sustainable Development (WBCSD) in 1992.

According to the WBCSD, “simply put, eco efficiency means creating more good and services while using ever-less resources and producing less waste and pollution”

But what are the means to ascertain that a product is eco-efficient? What are the reliable methodologies and tools at your disposal carry out such the eco-efficiency of your product ?

Recovery of products and services

Co-operation with neighbouring or partner companies can provide opportunities for a company to create value from its own waste products. In a process known as recovery, a by-product that appears useless to one company is identified as a valuable alternative resource for another. Synergizing by-products in this way contributes toward zero-waste or 100-percent-product targets and offers related cost benefits (WBCSD)

• Product/service value indicators relevant for any industry are sale units, mass quantities, net sales/turnover, product performance, services delivered,
• Environmental influence indicators relevant in product/service creation for any industry are energy consumption, materials consumption, water consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, ozone depleting substance emissions,
• The following indicators can also be used if properly defined : acidification emissions to air, total waste.

Other indicators can be defined but they are thought to be business specific.

How to make it thanks to ECOBILAN‘s skills and services?

All the generic indicators for environmental influence are available in Ecobilan’s environmental database.

The indicators for product/service value can either be the functional flow of the LCA project system or derived from accountancy information.

The operations to calculate the eco-efficiency ratios then involve some simple spreadsheet divisions

The results can then represent for instance :

• the mass of product per greenhouse gas emissions
• the net sales per greenhouse gas emissions
• the net sale of recycled waste reused as a material by a client company

There is a strong interest for the persons using these methods to use LCA as a framework to define criteria for decision support combining environment and economy.

Ecobilan as an expert in Life Cycle Assessment, is well positioned to carry out Life Cycle Costing (LCC) studies, Total Cost Assessment or Accounting (TCA), Cost-Benefit Analysis (CBA) and the MASIT methodology we have developed aims to take into account all the multicriteria necessary to a complete eco-efficiency. We invite you to take a look at the related pages about these methods.