A different approach from eco-efficiency – doing more with less environmental impact – eco-effectiveness is doing it right, being effective with respect to a rich mix of considerations and desires. It means producing the right thing, the right service, the right product, the right system -rather than making the wrong thing less bad. A cherry tree, which produces hundreds of blossoms and fruits for birds and humans so that eventually on pit will fall on the ground and produce another cherry tree won’t be efficient by modern standards. But the cherry tree does not deplete its environment, provides food for its surrounding eco-system and has survived for millions of years. Eco-effectiveness does not mean less. Who wants a cherry tree with less fruits or less flowers. Eco-effectiveness does not mean less waste – there is no waste in nature. Contrary to industrial or development growth, eco-effectiveness does not mean less growth, because nature grows the right things and grows them productively engaged with the rest of the eco-system. Another example is an ant community. As part of their daily activities they:
- safely and effectively handle their own material wastes and those of other species
- grow and harvest their own food while nurturing the ecosystem of which they are a part construct houses, farms, dumps, cemeteries, living quarters, and food-storage facilities from materials that can be truly recycled
- create disinfectants and medicines that are healthy, safe, and biodegradable
- maintain soil health for the entire planet. They are, as biologist E. O. Wilson has pointed out, the little things that run the world.
At the other hand, an industrial process will produce typically local benefits: jobs, more money in the local economy, useful things, but at the expense of a decline of the overall quality of life: air and water pollution, toxic wastes, depletion of natural resources, and at the end of its life the things themselves are discarded creating additional wastes. Eco-effective designers expand their visions from the primary purpose of a product and consider the whole. What are its goals and potential effects, both immediate and wide-ranging, with respect to both time and place? What is the entire system, -cultural, commercial, ecological – of which this will be a part? A green roof is a good example. A green roof does the following:
- Maintains the roof at a stable temperature.
- Insulates it in the winter
- Shields it from Solar UV rays
- Absorbs CO2
- Produces oxygen
- Reduces climate change
- Captures air pollution
- Absorb storm water
- Reduces heat island effect in the summer
Taking a eco-effective approach to design might result in an innovation so extreme that it resembles nothing we know, or it might merely show us how to optimize a system already in place. It is not the solution it self that is necessarily radical, but the shift in perspective with which we begin, form the old view of nature as something to be controlled to a stance of engagement. The concept of eco-effectiveness proposes a new design assignment. Instead of fine-tuning the existing destructive framework, create the following:
• source: Cradle To Cradle • Cross-Ref: Eco-effectiveness • See also XlnkS474