Eco-Efficiency and Eco-Design — A First Step toward Sustainable Performance

Abstract

Do you know how many liters of water are necessary to produce 1 kg of beefsteak? And a 250 ml glass of wine? And half a kilo-gram of bread? And a pack of 500 sheets of paper? The water footprint of a 1 kg beefsteak is approximately 15,000 liters; a glass of wine, 120 liters; the bread, 800 liters; while the pack of paper uses 5,000 liters of " blue gold. " 1 You are probably skeptical. To produce a 1 kg beefsteak, a cow eats more than one ton of cereal and seven tons of grass, which will have needed irriga-tion and rainwater, for around three years; similarly, the cow will have drunk more than 24 m 3 of water, not counting the water needed for the maintenance and cleaning of the cattle shed and equipment. The same reasoning is used to calculate the water footprint of the bread, the wine or paper. These simple exam-ples show the extraordinary quantity of resources hidden in each product or service that we use in our daily life. In the fi rst chapter we highlighted the growing importance for a company to manage its resources more effi ciently, particularly in terms of energy and raw materials, in order to safeguard its competitiveness and to reinforce its innovation capability. When hidden resources are integrated into the reasoning, the challenge becomes greater. There are several ways to use resources more effi ciently, as we will show hereafter. Eco-effi ciency is the fi rst step to a broader C. Sempels et al., Sustainable Innovation Strategy © Christophe Sempels and Jonas Hoffmann 2013 72 Sustainable Innovation Strategy change. This chapter will fi rst of all explain what is meant by eco-effi ciency and eco-design, what are their guiding principles and the best ways to deploy them. It will then highlight the impact of eco-design on the company business model, based on the sustainable business model canvas presented in the previous chapter. We do not intend to present the operational steps of eco-design implementation, but rather understand its strategic reach.