Eco-efficiency links economic efficiency with environmental efficiency. The main purpose of the concept is to identify and implement activities to enable production that is both economically more efficient and cleaner. This means that parameters with a high indicative value have to be used.
Since both the environmental and the economic performance of industries must be described concurrently, environmental intensity appears to be a good indicator of eco-efficiency. Environmental intensity is environmental impact per unit of economic performance. In this paper, the environmental impact of industry classes is derived from emission data, released by the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER), and then aggregated and assessed using Eco-Indicator 99, a single-score life-cycle impact assessment (LCIA) method. The calculated ratio is thus an accurate description of the environmental–economic state of industry classes. The main advantage of this approach is the underlying consistent statistical framework, that permits, on a disaggregated level, economic data to be correlated with ecological data and to be frequently updated.
This single indicator facilitates a comparison of environmental intensity of different industry classes. The paper shows that it is possible to deduce a disaggregated eco-efficiency indicator, which is exemplified using German data, however could be analysed for different European countries.
The concept of eco-efficiency aims at linking economic performance with its environmental impact. According to the World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD), eco-efficiency is “being achieved by the delivery of competitively priced goods and services that satisfy human needs and bring quality of life, while progressively reducing ecological impacts and resources intensity throughout the life cycle, to a level at least in line with the Earth's estimated carrying capacity” (WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), 1992 and WBCSD (World Business Council for Sustainable Development), 2000a).
The simplicity of the concept and its practical importance led to its widespread acceptance by enterprises. The concept is used by them as an instrument to support decisions for alternative investment and production strategies to contribute to sustainable development because it connects improved competitiveness and better environmental performance (Saling et al., 2002). Seiler-Hausmann et al. (2004) demonstrate for example that the importance of the eco-efficiency concept varies for different companies. For some companies “the concept of eco-efficiency is a starting point that some companies may not yet have reached, others are already taking their initiatives much further” (Seiler-Hausmann et al., 2004, p. 9).
Although the eco-efficiency concept initially focused on companies, it was later adapted for the examination of policy strategies and their possible macroeconomic outcomes (European Commission, 2002). Outside its original field of application, however, the life cycle approach—an important principle of eco-efficiency (WBCSD, 1992)—loses its relevance for assessment since it is always related to a product or a service. The concept, furthermore, is now also being applied to the total economy with its interconnected processes.
A detailed examination of the eco-efficiency of economies, i.e. an analysis identifying and ideally quantifying the main driving forces of macroeconomic eco-efficiency, needs a rather disaggregated mapping of economic activities. Due to the heterogeneity of economic activities, macroeconomic policy measures could affect different enterprises and sectors in different ways, leading for instance to a loss of income and employment in those sectors that are negatively involved, which a society may not accept.
Disaggregated indicators are needed to better understand the eco-efficiency of economies. A disaggregated indicator should consider the eco-efficiency of branches, which could also be seen as the missing link between the activities of individual companies and the macroeconomic level or, in other words, as a means of connecting the micro level with the macro-level performance of societies (Huppes, 2007 and Huppes and Ishikawa, 2009). The current state of eco-efficiency research and practice does not support measuring the eco-efficiency of branches. There is no generally accepted application and no widespread research on the eco-efficiency of the companies in disaggregated sectors and on disaggregated macroeconomic approaches.
In this paper, we present an approach for analysing the environmental–economic performance of an economy at the level of disaggregated sectors, i.e. the industry-class level. It links data from the European Pollutant Emission Register (EPER) to the impact assessment method Eco-indicator 99 in order to facilitate a widespread assessment of environmental performance over a wide range of emissions. The data generated on the environmental impact are combined with statistical data on economic performance. The source data are updated at regular intervals.
The paper is organized as follows: In Section 2 is a discussion of the necessity of monitoring the eco-efficiency of industry classes. An examination of the current state of research on eco-efficiency indicators is viewed as a step toward implementing the concept of eco-efficiency in practice. Section 3 proposes a new eco-efficiency approach to analysing the structure of the environmental–economic performance of an economy that has implemented a European directive to combating environmental pollution (IPPC directive, Commission of the European Communities, 2000). In Section 4, the pattern of the eco-efficiency of German industry is analysed as an example for using the proposed indicator. The approach is discussed in more detail in Section 5. Section 6 offers some concluding remarks.
