Eco-Efficiency and H2o
Eco-efficiency simply means, 'creating more goods and services with ever less use of resources, waste and pollution'. Eco-efficiency is everywhere. Universities teach it; consulting companies charge you to tell you how to do it; organizations like UN, OECD, EC, WBCSD hold conferences about it. The need for speed-to-market water management solutions to boost efficiency is growing fast. Eco-efficiency is an open, expanding, and evolving concept.
Eco-efficiency 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. Eco-efficiency indicators have passed the test of business practicality.
Today, water-efficiency, eco-efficiency and resource efficiency get more attention. The concept is so obvious - save money, use less water, materials and energy and minimize pollution. Governments encourage companies towards efficiency. Eco-efficient companies become more profitable. Non-eco-efficient competitors become less competitive.
Companies are applying the eco-efficiency concept in their business and many government agencies are running eco-efficiency programs for their constituencies. Eco-efficiency is a WIN-WIN situation.
H2oAlliance and the concept of Eco-Efficiency
Eco-efficiency is our management philosophy which encourages all business partners and customers to search for water-related environmental improvements that yield parallel economic benefits. We focus on business opportunities and allows companies to become more environmentally responsible and more profitable. We foster innovation and therefore growth and competitiveness.
Efficiency is achieved by the delivery of competitively-priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resource intensity throughout the life-cycle to a level at least in line with the earth's estimated carrying capacity. In short, eco-efficiency creates more value with less impact.
It is important to understand that eco-efficiency is not limited simply to making incremental efficiency improvements in existing practices and habits. That is much too narrow a view. On the contrary, eco-efficiency should stimulate creativity and innovation in the search for new ways of doing things. Nor is eco-efficiency limited to areas within a company's boundaries, such as in manufacturing and plant management.
It is also valid for activities upstream and downstream of a manufacturer's plant and involves the supply and product value-chains. Consequently, it can be a great challenge to development engineers, purchasers, product portfolio managers, marketing specialists and even finance and control. Eco-efficiency opportunities can emerge at any point in the entire life-cycle of a product.
However, eco-efficiency is not sufficient by itself because it integrates only two of sustainability's three elements, economics and ecology, while leaving the third, social progress, outside its embrace. The role of business is to satisfy human needs and it expects to be rewarded with profits for doing so. But our responsible business partners and customers also aim to improve quality of life and this is very much part of what it means to become more sustainable. The challenge is to do this without increasing the overall use of water and other resources and having an adverse effect on the environment.
H2oAlliance and the Business of Eco-Efficiency
In simple terms, eco-efficiency to us means doing more with less. The concept of eco-efficiency is internationally recognized as the way business can contribute to the sustainability of a society.
We strongly support eco-efficiency, as it has both economic and environmental benefits. By being eco-efficient through water, goods and services can be produced with less water and energy and fewer raw materials, resulting in reduced freshwater usage, waste, less pollution and lower costs. As we face water and resource constrained future, it is becoming increasingly important to use water and other resources more efficiently. The state governments support and encourage ecologically sustainable development by ensuring its policies include waste and pollution strategies.
Eco-efficiency is primarily our business concept because it talks the language of business. Put simply, it says that becoming more efficient makes good business sense. Eco-efficiency calls for our partners to achieve more value from lower inputs of materials and energy and with reduced emissions. It applies throughout our organization - to marketing and product development as much as to manufacturing or distribution. We are concerned with three broad objectives:
Reducing the consumption of resources: This includes minimizing the use of water, energy, materials and land, enhancing recyclability and product durability, and closing material loops.
Reducing the impact on nature: This includes minimizing water discharges, air emissions, waste disposal and the dispersion of toxic substances, as well as fostering the sustainable use of renewable resources.
Increasing product or service value: This means providing more benefits to customers through product functionality, flexibility and modularity, providing additional services and focusing on selling the functional needs that customers actually want. This raises the possibility of the customer receiving the same functional need with fewer materials and less resources.
Implementing Resource Efficiency Management System (REMS) that is integrated with existing business management systems in order to drive the water and eco-efficiency approach. REMS ensures that all the risks and opportunities relating to water and sustainability are properly identified and efficiently managed.
Implementing Eco-Efficiency
Implementing eco-efficiency in a company's business processes is first and foremost about navigating for opportunities. Such opportunities can be found in four areas:
- Companies can re-engineer their processes to reduce the consumption of water and other resources, reduce pollution and avoid risks, while at the same time saving costs.
- By cooperating with other companies, many businesses have found creative ways to re-valorize their byproducts. In striving for zero-waste or 100%-product targets, they have found that the so-called waste from their processes can have value for another company.
- Companies can become more water and eco-efficient by redesigning their products.
- Some innovative companies not only redesign a product, they find new ways of meeting customer needs. They work with customers or other stakeholder groups to re-think their markets and re-shape demand and supply completely. Too many customers' needs today are met in a material- and energy-intensive way. There are different, and better, ways of satisfying those needs.
- Water and eco-efficiency works not just in large ME's, transnational companies, but also in SME's, small and medium-size enterprises. Likewise, it is as applicable in developing countries and emerging economies as it is in the industrialized nations.
- We focus on eco-efficiency objectives and opportunities to show the effect of management systems that support eco-efficient improvements; Ways of measuring and reporting the overall performance of a company using eco-efficiency ratios; measuring eco-efficiency, in which we put forward a framework which can be used to measure progress toward economic and environmental sustainability. The framework is flexible enough to be widely applied and easily interpreted across the business spectrum while providing a common set of definitions, principles and indicators.
Politics, Water and Eco-Efficiency
Business cannot achieve water and eco-efficiency alone. Progress requires going beyond the internal actions of individual companies; it requires close cooperation among the stakeholders. It needs society to create an enabling framework which allows individual companies and whole markets to become more water and eco-efficient. Governments have an important role to play in creating these conditions.
Already, several countries and regions have enacted national and regional action plans aimed at fostering a more water and eco-efficient and sustainable society. Arriving at a broad consensus on headline composite indicators and setting appropriate targets are among the crucial elements that will help the transition to a water-efficiency and eco-efficient economy.
Governments can implement a policy which fosters economic growth and favors a reduction in water and other resource use and the avoidance of pollution with incentives for innovation. Such policy measures to leverage business initiatives for more water and eco-efficiency can include elements such as: Identifying and eliminating perverse subsidies; Internalizing environmental costs; Shifting tax from labor and profit to resource use and pollution; Developing and implementing economic instruments; Promoting voluntary initiatives and negotiated agreements.
Various multi-stakeholder organizations and governmental bodies are implementing several projects to develop eco-efficiency further as a policy concept. With European Partners for the Environment (EPE), supported from the European Commission Directorate General for Enterprises, the WBCSD launched the European Eco-efficiency Initiative (EEEI) in 1998. In its first two years, the initiative has promoted the understanding and use of eco-efficiency throughout Europe and supported and facilitated national initiatives, as well as the creation of eco-efficiency action plans. There is a focus made on Central and Eastern European Countries (CEEC), several of which are in the process of accession to the European Union. The WBCSD has a long tradition of cooperating with business organizations in developing countries and emerging economies in particular through its Regional Network of 24 national BCSDs and partner organizations with a total membership of over 800 companies in Latin America, Southern Africa, East and Southeast Asia and Eastern Europe.
Governments can quantify eco-efficiency as well and they can use it to drive the sustainability performance of the entire economy. Factors 4 and 10 are eco-efficiency targets for the economy. By calling for increased welfare and reduced use of nature and for environmental space to be more equally distributed, one is really setting macro-economic eco-efficiency objectives. Companies can, and must, contribute to attaining these objectives but they cannot do so alone.
The European Environment Agency (EEA) has adopted eco-efficiency ratio indicators for countries, asking for an absolute and relative de-linking of growth of welfare from the use of nature. It intends to measure and compare economic sectors and countries with each other according to their eco-efficiency status and improvements. The agency has announced a set of Headline Indicators with the intention of developing a data basis for European countries and economic sectors. EEA is working toward matching headline indicators for nations and generally applicable indicators for corporate reporting. Governments can use various incentives to promote action toward progress and support initiatives to advance eco-efficiency rewarding the leading-edge companies and putting pressure on the laggards.
Incentives to reward eco-efficiency will guide innovation in the right direction and create new products and services. Eco-efficiency leads to more value from fewer resources, through redesign of products and services and through new solutions. The more successful companies will be those that set themselves tough environmental targets and meet them with new technologies and practices.
Water and Eco-Efficient Economy
Eco-efficiency can serve companies as a means for developing and successfully implementing a water business strategy toward sustainability. Such a strategy will have a strong focus on technological and social innovation, accountability and transparency, as well as on cooperation with other parts of society with a view to achieving the set objectives.
Similar to the way it serves the private sector, water and eco-efficiency can support governments in deriving a national strategy for sustainable development. Establishing framework conditions which foster innovation and transparency and which allow sharing responsibility among stakeholders will amplify eco-efficiency for the entire economy and deliver progress toward sustainability.
The economy, together with the quality of life, will continue to grow, while the use of water and other resources and pollution will go down. All parts of society share the responsibility for progress. Business has an important part to play and accepts the challenge. But similarly there is also a need for governments and civil society to play their part to focus on action points which, if adopted by the various stakeholder groups, will help move the world forward toward an eco-efficient future.
Eco-Efficiency and Business Principles
The application of eco-efficiency principles to a water business is dependent on industry type and the size of business. Therefore specialist advice should be sought if a business is intending to adopt eco-efficiency principles. Businesses are advised to engage their staff in the process of eco-efficiency improvements, as poor work practices form a significant proportion of inefficiencies.
Water and Resource Efficiency
To reduce water usage it is necessary to determine the amount of water being used. We develop and use Composite Water Indicators (CWI's) and Resource Efficiency (REI's) and implement monitoring and measuring platform solutions to assist businesses and organizations analyze water quality and water use to improve resource efficiency, eco-efficiency and reduce freshwater, energy and material usage.
To mitigate risks, manage crisis and minimize pollution it is necessary to improve real-time data collection and boost monitoring and measuring of source, treated, recycled and waste water. We offer water risk and crisis management solutions to assist businesses and organizations monitor and measure water quality and share information more efficiently.
To improve eco-efficiency it is necessary to use technology. We advance the use of new-technology and offers speed-to-market technology, tools, devices, systems, advice, methods and practices to assist businesses and organizations improve their resource efficiency at local, regional and global level.
Resource Efficiency
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