Zero Waste by Robin Murray, Greenpeace Environmental Trust 2002

municipal sector. The eco-efficiency literature is full of
examples of firms cutting waste and toxic emissions by
orders of magnitude. 47
Eco-efficiency and innovation
In its early phases of application, eco-efficiency is applied
to on-site processes and later to products. 48 This has led to
the criticism that eco-efficiency merely provides a
‘greenwash’ to the existing industrial system. Running a
chlorine factory with fewer emissions cannot obscure the
fact that chlorine-based products are major sources of
pollution as they pass down the chain. Or to take a recent
British example, one of the UK incinerators was recently
awarded the ISO 140l standard for environmental
performance at the very time when it was mixing its
highly dioxinated fly and bottom ash, storing it in the
open air and allowing it to be used in urban domestic
construction projects as a means of waste reduction.
Were eco-efficiency to remain limited in this way, the
criticism would be well founded. Yet when a new way of
looking at production and product design comes into play,
with new touchstones and sensitivities, it is impossible to
confine the approach to the role of propping up old
production. For a fresh paradigm of this sort opens up
whole unexplored territories for development – for
technology, for products and for ‘productive systems’,
similar in many ways to those created by electronics. As
with electronics, the industrial firms that fail to respond to
the new opportunities will be sidelined by the firms that
do. By the end of the 1990s environmental performance
had become recognised as a key element of the new
competition.
Clean Production
Clean production is one way in which eco-efficiency has
moved beyond the old. The WBCSD guideline ‘reduce
toxic dispersion’ is the weakest formulation of the seven
and reflects the vigour with which some branches of the
chemical industry have defended their products in spite of
their prevalent toxicity. 49 Yet the pressure to develop green
chemicals and alternative non-toxic products has been
intense and increasingly successful. Environmental
pressure has forced the phasing out of toxic products such
as DDT, leaded petrol, CFCs and halons, and the
Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants
will now target a further twelve organochlorines.
At the same time new products have been developed – as
alternatives to banned and threatened substances
(examples would be wet cleaning as an alternative to dry
cleaning, plant-based inks and dyes, lead-free paint, as
well as the remarkable rise of organic and till free
agriculture). While the Stockholm Convention covers only
twelve out of the 70,000 chemicals now in use, this should
not diminish its importance. It lays down a marker for
greener production. It shows a readiness to phase out
toxic materials whatever their economic significance, and
it means the eyes of the world now have the full range of
chemicals in their sights.
The commodity-service economy
A second area that is being transformed is that of durable
goods. In many of the durable sectors waste has been
handled beneath the managerial radar line, since the cost
of disposal has been minimal. The introduction of
producer responsibility legislation, and demands for
increased recycling and resource efficiency, are changing
this. Firms are being forced to re-assess their products
from the viewpoint of product life and recyclability. A
new ‘durable’ industrial paradigm is emerging as a result,
variously described as de-materialisation, the access
economy, and the ‘servicising’ economy. Each of these
formulations points to the increasing significance of
knowledge-based services to modern production and the
declining economic significance of material products.
One of those closest to these changes is Walter Stahel, of
the Product Life Institute in Geneva. He and his colleagues
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