Summary: Course Book

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• 1 Introduction to Environmentally Improved Production

• Is technical progress always accompanied by resource conservation, efficiency of resource use or improved safety?

  No, it is not. For example, efficiency in nutrient use has greatly decreased. 
  Technological improvements in terms of efficiency are not always reflected by lower inputs for particular services (car traffic).  
  Savings made by environmentally improved technologies can lead to changes in customer behaviour, i.e. rebound effects (energy saving lamps, 2 cars per household)
  Technological progress has been marked by the appearance of new and spectacular risks (explosive nitrate fertilizers, oil spills).

• 1.1 Environmentally improved production: the historical social context

• How come that environmental improvements were made long before the notion of 'environmental problems' was known?

  They were often of the 'win-win' type: they saved money/time and brought about environmental improvements

• 1.2 A variety of approaches

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• What are the similarities between the approaches?

  The focus of the approaches is constructive rather than analytical.
  The approaches to environmental improvement are science-based.

• 1.3 Environmental performance of economic production: the scientific basis

• What is wrong with the economic angle on environmental production?

  Traditional economic theory implies full substitutability of natural resources by labour and financial capital. As a result, it ignores the importance of the environment for sustaining production and consumption, and the limits of depletable resources and the effects of a pulluted environment.

• Name the scientific foundations of two major problems of production and consumption.

  Resource depletion and waste and pollutants generation. All activities necessarily require the use of a low entropy fuel, and release a certain amount of 'waste entropy'.

• What is 'industrial metabolism'?

  Industrial metabolism is 'the energy and value-yielding processes essential to economic development'. An analysis of the inflows and outflows of materials energy at the process level is a combination of the materials balance principle (mass in = mass out) and the entropy law (entropy in < entroply out)

• What are the scientific foundations of environmental science?

  The materials balance principle (the law of the conservation of mass) and the second law of thermodynamics, the 'entropy law'.

• How could you phrase the objective of environmentally improved production in thermodynamic terms?

  How to get rid of surplus entropy in the least damaging way.

• 1.4 Frameworks and approaches for environmentally improved production

• Name a number of concepts in the approaches for EIP

  Examples of concepts are Life-Cycle thinking, design for environment (DfE), cleaner technology, green chemistry, dematerialization, industrial symbiosis. They provide an overall strategy.

• Distinguish the two tools for environmental decision support, analytical tools and prodedural tools.

  The analytical tool transforms collected data into other numerical data (to calculate impact data, or an ecological footprint).
  Procedural tools work with checklists to establish the presence of certain important features (whether there is a safety protocol, whether all requirements for a certification are met).