Factor 10: The future of stuff

Schmidt-Bleek, Friedrich

doi:10.1080/15487733.2008.11908009

Cited by 20 publications

(19 citation statements)

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“…These factor calculations assume that A and T are independent, but in the lighting example discussed here, this is not the case since the reduction in T (increased ecoefficiency) leads to a growth in A. While it is generally acknowledged that a strong increase in the eco-efficiency of products and technologies is a pre-requisite for the development of a global sustainable society [25], the example illustrates that a focus on eco-efficiency alone is not sufficient to bring us in the direction of a sustainable production and consumption.…”

Section: What Has the Focus On Eco-efficiency Brought Us?mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…If the current level of impact is unsustainable and must be reduced, this poses stronger requirements for reductions in T. Overall increases in our ecoefficiency by factors of 4, 10 or even as high as 50 have been proposed, reflecting different assumptions about the time horizon over which the development is observed, the developments in P and A and the required reduction in I [24,25,26,27]. These factor calculations assume that A and T are independent, but in the lighting example discussed here, this is not the case since the reduction in T (increased ecoefficiency) leads to a growth in A.…”

Section: What Has the Focus On Eco-efficiency Brought Us?mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Better – But is it Good Enough? On the Need to Consider Both Eco-efficiency and Eco-effectiveness to Gauge Industrial Sustainability

Hauschild

2015

Procedia CIRP

124

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Sustainability is gaining prominence among the priorities of large companies, and engineers have taken on the eco-efficiency challenge, optimizing the functionality and minimizing the negative environmental impacts of our products and technologies. Although impressive improvements in efficiency can be demonstrated in many local cases, increases in population, affluence and consumption create an opposite trend that we need to factor in when we address sustainability of our technological developments in an absolute sense. The paper discusses absolute boundaries for environmental sustainability, metrics for gauging our solutions against these boundaries and the need and possibilities of expanding our focus from efficiency to effectiveness.

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Section: What Has the Focus On Eco-efficiency Brought Us?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: What Has the Focus On Eco-efficiency Brought Us?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Better – But is it Good Enough? On the Need to Consider Both Eco-efficiency and Eco-effectiveness to Gauge Industrial Sustainability

Hauschild

2015

Procedia CIRP

124

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“…This may be a useful proxy for some environmental impacts, but a broader concept is needed for evaluating long-term sustainability. Both factor 4 and factor 10 connect human wealth and well-being with resource productivity (Schmidt-Bleek, 2008;von Weizs€ acker et al, 1997), but omit to account for the resource recovery at the end of MCPs lifecycles. Improved efficiency in the use of primary resources, as described by the principle of ecoefficiency, can cause rebound effects (Hertwich, 2005) that in the medium-to long-term lead to an increase in the global primary resource consumption; an effect known as the "Jevons paradox" (Holm and Englund, 2009).…”

Section: Evolution Of the Context Of Resource Recovery From Wastementioning

confidence: 99%

A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste

Iacovidou

Millward-Hopkins

Busch

et al. 2017

Journal of Cleaner Production

213

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a b s t r a c tThe transition to a circular economy, where the value of resources is preserved in the technosphere, must be supported by policies and operational decision-making based on evidence. Existing methods used to provide this evidence (e.g. LCA, LCSA, CBA) are not robust enough to adequately address the creation and dissipation of systemic and multidimensional value that spans the social, environmental, economic and technical domains. This study proposes a novel, conceptual approach that seeks to assess how complex value is created, destroyed and distributed in resource recovery from waste systems. This approach expands beyond conventional methods of estimating value. It combines scientific and engineering methods with a socio-political narrative grounded in the systems of provision (sop) approach, and provides a comprehensive, analytical framework for making the transition to a resource-efficient future. This framework has the potential to connect bottom-up and top-down approaches in assessing resource recovery from waste systems, and address systemic challenges through transparency and flexibility, while accounting for the dynamic and non-linear nature of commodities flow and infrastructure provision in the overall system. This creates the pathway towards circular economy, and lays the foundations for future advances in computational and assessment methodologies in the field of RRfW. Crown

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“…In contrast to policy makers, academia has developed and suggested targets for achieving absolute reductions of resource use by 2050 at the global as well as national levels. Prominent among these is the concept of reducing resource use by a factor of x, where x stands for different ambition levels ranging from a factor of 4 (reducing by 75%) [30], 5 (reducing by 80%) [31] to 10 (reducing by 90%) [32,33]. Furthermore, scientists proposed target limits of around 50 billion tonnes of global material consumption by 2050 ( [34][35][36]; see also Bringezu (2015) [13]) and a triplet of per capita targets relating to different indicators:…”

Section: A Need For Going Beyond Resource Efficiency Oriented Policies?mentioning

confidence: 99%

Contemporary Resource Policy and Decoupling Trends—Lessons Learnt from Integrated Model-Based Assessments

2018

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Addressing climate change and natural resource depletion has been key to the international and national sustainability agenda for almost 30 years. Despite existing efforts, global CO 2 emissions and raw material use levels continue to grow. This seems to suggest the need for more systemic approaches in environmental policy. Our paper contributes modelling results to assess the potential of efficiency improvements to achieve absolute decoupling of global raw material use and environmental impacts from economic growth. We apply the global, dynamic MRIO model GINFORS to simulate potential effects of raw material efficiency improvements in production against a climate mitigation scenario baseline. Our simulation experiments indicate that (rather radical) progress in the raw material efficiency of production technologies in concert with extensive climate mitigation efforts could enable an absolute decoupling of resource use and CO 2 emissions from GDP growth at a global level and for some countries. The absolute raw material extraction levels achieved, however, still exceed the material use reduction targets suggested by sustainability scientists. Our findings highlight that achieving such targets without addressing rebound effects is implausible. Hence, we call upon policy makers to integrate rebound mitigation strategies and move beyond exclusively improving efficiency to tackling structural and behavioural changes.

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Factor 10: The future of stuff

Cited by 20 publications

References 0 publications

Better – But is it Good Enough? On the Need to Consider Both Eco-efficiency and Eco-effectiveness to Gauge Industrial Sustainability

Better – But is it Good Enough? On the Need to Consider Both Eco-efficiency and Eco-effectiveness to Gauge Industrial Sustainability

A pathway to circular economy: Developing a conceptual framework for complex value assessment of resources recovered from waste

Contemporary Resource Policy and Decoupling Trends—Lessons Learnt from Integrated Model-Based Assessments

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