Environmental effects of products

Every industrial activity and product damages the environment to a certain extent. Raw materials must be extracted from the ground and trees cut; then trucks, trains, ships and planes must transport these materials to manufacturing locations and their products has to be packaged and distributed. During use, some of these products may require additional resources , such as electricity or gasoline. Finally, the used products must be recycled or disposed.

As discussed earlier, in the Life Cycle Assessment of the sum total of the environmental impacts of a product, all the stages of its life must be examined and quantified. In conducting an LCA, it is relatively easy to determine the contribution of a particular stage of operation to a certain environmental problem, such as the greenhouse effect, acidification, eutrophication, etc. A difficulty arises when one wants to add up the various impacts and produce a single number that can be compared to an alternative process or product. To do so meaningfully, one needs to use the proper weighting factors, as discussed earlier.

The second problem with carrying out LCA studies is that if one has to start from “scratch” every time, it is a very complex and time-consuming process. Eco-indicators 99 has attempted to overcome these problems by a) providing a weighing method that allows summing up of individual impacts, and b) developing a library of Eco-indicator values for the most common material and processes used in industrial activities. It is expected that this data base will become richer in the future as more people use this method and their experience is used to refine this system of measuring environmental costs.

The students in this course are also challenged to look at the Eco-99 values critically, question those that do not seem to make sense, use the system in their IE term papers and, later, in their careers as Earth and environmental engineers. Eco-indicators 99 are defined in such a way that they fit together like building blocks. E.g., there is an indicator for the production of a kilo of polyethylene, one for the injection molding of a kilo of polyethylene and another for the incineration of one kilo of used polyethylene. In the Eco-99 system, the higher the number of the indicator, the greater is the environmental impact. After all, it represents the environmental cost of a certain human activity.

Uses and limitations of Eco-indicators 99

During the design of a product or process, a large number of options are examined and the best options identified. In the economic system, these options are “weighed” in terms of number of dollars per unit of production, unit of service, etc. Therefore, when all other factors are equal, the lowest cost option is preferred. Similarly, in the environmental system, the available options are “weighed” in terms of their respective Eco-indicator values. The lowest Eco-99 value signifies the best option from an environmental perspective. It can be seen that the Eco-indicator system of measurement provides a value system for measuring environmental performance, much as the traditional cost-benefit analysis has done over the centuries for the economic systems.

“Rome was not built in one day” and it will take a long time for people to pay as much attention to the new system as they have learnt to do with the economic system that offers immediate awards and punishment (try to skip paying your rent to Columbia over two months). The developers of Eco-indicators 99 stress that it is a tool intended for internal use by producers and manufacturers and should not be used to prove to the public that one’s product is better than the competition. Yet, when the public starts worrying and environmental value systems start to intersect and mother about the environment and choosing its purchases accordingly, the economic Earth can take a deep breath of relief.