When Oil Majors Embrace Material Flow Analysis, New Hope for a Sustainable 21st Century Arises
February 18, 2013There are manifold approaches to close the apparent gap between a shrinking resource base on the one hand and the ever rising human resource demand on the other. For the longest time, the world's big industrial players have followed a strategy to successfully ignore the former, since environmental and social costs were merely negligible external effects. We could call this approach a procrastina...
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337 Opinions on the Most Resource-Efficient Policy Instruments to ...
February 11, 2013Quite a few of the European Commission's 23,000 civil servants devote themselves to the environment. Just over 500, to be precise. It is this very department, the Directorate-General Environment, that created the Online Resource Efficiency Platform OREP. In the first months of last year, OREP conducted a stakeholder consultation on “Delivering more Sustainable Consumption and Production” (PDF Link), and obtained the views of nearly 340 citizens and organizations on the best way to do so. Let me share a part of the results with you today and see which political instruments European stakeholder...
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Better, Different, Less – Green Economy Revisited
September 17, 2012 2 Comments“Post Growth Economy or Resource Efficiency Revolution – How Should We Face the Limits of Our Planet?” This question I asked in a blog post half a year ago. On the green growth vs. post-growth front, an interesting publication caught my attention recently. Barbara Unmüßig and Thomas Fatheuer from the “Heinrich Böll Stiftung”, a foundation associated with Germany's Green Party, and Wolfgang Sachs, member of the club of Rome and former Wuppertal Institut researcher, published a “Critique of the Green Economy” in April with a translation to English that followed in June. In it, they discussed the...
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Post Growth Economy or Resource Efficiency Revolution – How Shoul ...
March 11, 2012 2 CommentsEconomic growth is a means of producing wealth. No doubt about that. However, there are two central problems linked to this logic. First, the term "wealth" loses its meaning, when you exclusively apply it to financial abundance. Wealth, considered from a holistic viewpoint, does not only include the presence of money, but also other vital elements that help guarantee a certain quality of life, e.g., safety, health, freedom, environmental quality and successful social relations - to name the most important ones. Second, a growing GDP says nothing about wealth distribution. The lower the dispari...
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Four Fit-For-Future Bachelor Programs in Europe
January 28, 2012 5 CommentsRemember the time when you struggled to find the right program of study? Or have you just finished high school recently and are now searching for a university career that suits you? The task before you seems almost beyond your capacities? Calm down. Here are four bachelor degrees that matter. On the one hand, you are right. Prospective students have never been confronted with such a large variety of study programs as they are today. Scientific and business communities have reached a degree of specialization never seen before. On the other hand, it has never been as easy as it is today to mo...
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Terminating the End-of-Pipe Era by Simple Means of Process Optimi ...
December 4, 2011 2 CommentsIn the course of the last three decades, more and more voices have called for cleaner industry. Today, 20 years after the legendary Rio summit, the voices in favor of the environment seem to sound rather like a choir, echoing calls for strict legislation and increasingly low limiting values. When lowering emissions has thus become a concern for everyone, the biggest emitters in particular need to fulfill their obligations. And the biggest emitter? Definitely industry. Industry with its long favored end of pipe technology. End of pipe technology, however, is unproductive, since it has no benefi...
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Waste Prevention vs. Recycling - Analyzing Material Flow Accounts
August 30, 2011 3 CommentsWhy should we even bother about recycling, when we could prevent waste in the first place? Well, according to the following study, published in May 2011, forget that question. Turn it around. We shouldn't even bother about waste prevention. Seeking a European Resource Efficiency Framework In an attempt to estimate the impact of policy efforts, the European Comission ordered several studies, aiming at the development of a frameweork contract for resource efficieny. The most interesting of all these studies is the analysis of the Key Contributions to Resource Efficiency. Three parties were inv...
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Information and Interaction – Social Media in an “analogue way”: ...
August 26, 2011Two important events upcoming this week: From Sunday 28th August on, the Life Cycle Management takes place in Berlin. Life Cycle Management is one of the most important topics within industrial production today, as it covers both environmental and economic questions. In the pre-sustainability-era, the public discussion on life cycles was mainly focused on typical management models like Boston Consulting's four steps: product development, production, use and degeneration. Due to that perspective, companies spent most attention and money to product development. But times have changed. Or should ...
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Carbon Neutral Online Shopping – How Green are Mail Order Compani ...
August 29, 2012 7 Comments -
Only 16.7% of Global Energy Consumption Is Renewable – Ways for I ...
June 26, 2012 6 Comments -
Biomass Lagging Behind Prospering Wind and Solar Markets
September 1, 2011 6 Comments -
How Sustainable are Europe's 5 Million E-Cars in 2020? New LCA Gu ...
February 5, 2013 5 Comments -
10 Appropriate Indicators to Measure Green Growth in Industry
December 17, 2012 5 Comments
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5 Clear-Cut Economic Benefits of Sustainability Reporting
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How to Recycle Phosphorus, the Most Least-Known Scarce Resource
May 6, 2013 1 Comment -
ISO 14051-Based Material Flow Cost Accounting in a Nutshell
May 1, 2013 1 Comment -
Who's Happier – The Proactive Lohas or the Spontaneous Hedonist? ...
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The Truth About the Dragon: China's Future is Inevitably Green
April 3, 2013 1 Comment
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Thanks Moritz for the interesting blog post. Recently ARTE T ...
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A very nice blog explaining the basic idea as well as the be ...
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[...] valued the universal guidelines for all sorts of envi ...
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[...] 5-Fold Increase in Efficiency – Not Delusional at All ...
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[...] Diese weiße Weste verträgt ruhig ein paar Kleckse Konz ...
April 21, 2013
