Enabling green growth: sustainable manufacturing and eco-innovation

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What's new | Background
Framework, practices and measurement: key findings
Work in 2009-2010 | Documents | Related websites | Contact

Innovation in technologies and how they are applied are key to enabling industry to create new business values while also benefiting people and the planet. In recent years, manufacturing companies have been upgrading their efforts towards sustainable manufacturing from pollution prevention to integrated approaches that take into account product lifecycles and wider impacts. Eco-innovation helps to enable this evolution through a combination of technological and non-technological changes that can yield substantial environmental improvements. The current economic crisis and climate change negotiations should be taken as a great opportunity to move towards a green economy by accelerating eco-innovation.

What's new

Eco-Innovation in Industry: Enabling Green Growth (published in January 2010)

The first phase of the OECD Project on Sustainable Manufacturing and Eco-innovation was concluded in April 2009. This phase focused on the development of an analytical framework and a review of the state of current knowledge in industry practices, policy initiatives and measurement. The publication of the full report of the first phase of the project was announced by OECD Secretary-General Angel Gurría in December 2009 at a media briefing during the COP15 meeting in Copenhagen. The book is part of the OECD Innovation Strategy series and the first contribution to the OECD Green Growth Strategy.

Sustainable manufacturing toolkit ready for testing

A draft “sustainable manufacturing toolkit” was completed in October 2009. The toolkit aims to help companies measure and improve their sustainability performance by providing guidance on benchmarking their products and production processes. Download the overview document or contact us for the full version. Note that this is still in the test phase and refinements are still being made. We would like to hear about your experience and results if you use the draft toolkit.

Background

Improving resource and energy use and engaging in a broad range of innovations to improve environmental performance will lead to new industries and new jobs in coming years. Incremental improvement is not enough, however. Industry must be restructured, and existing and breakthrough technologies must be more innovatively applied to realise green growth. Short-term relief packages deployed today can stimulate investments in technologies and infrastructures that help innovation and enable changes in the way we produce and consume goods and services.

In this context, the OECD Project on Sustainable Manufacturing and Eco-innovation was launched in 2008 to better understand how innovation can result in new technological and systemic solutions to global challenges and to provide industry with a means to improve their contributions to sustainable development.

Framework, practices and measurement: key findings

The first phase of the project focused on the development of an analytical framework and a review of the state of current knowledge on industry practices, policy initiatives and measurement. The overall findings are:

The evolution of sustainable manufacturing has been realised through both technological and non-technological eco-innovations.
Improvement in indicators and measurement can accelerate corporate efforts and deepen understanding of eco-innovation by industry and policy makers alike.
Better understanding of the right levers for eco-innovation from both supply and demand side is needed for developing an effective policy mix.

More details including nine key findings can be found in the synthesis report.

Eco-innovation has three dimensions: its targets (the main focus), its mechanisms (methods for introducing changes in the target) and its impacts (the effects on environmental conditions). Eco-innovation also involves both technological and non-technological changes.

Work in 2009-2010

In the current economic crisis, eco-innovation is gaining ground within both industry and government as an effective way to tackle climate change and to foster green growth. Phase II (2009-10) of this project aims to better understand highly complex nature of such innovations and guiding policy makers and industry practitioners for putting more innovative solutions into practice. The outcomes of this project will form an integral part of the OECD Innovation Strategy as well as the OECD Green Growth Strategy.

Phase II activities include:

Development of a toolkit to help businesses benchmark their performance and improve their production processes and products;
Gathering and in-depth analyses of examples of eco-innovations to extract lessons for practitioners and policy makers;
Identification of promising policies that encourage eco-innovation by sharing best practices among OECD governments; and
Investigating the process of restructuring and renewal of the industry towards a greener economy to help governments develop effective policies to facilitate green growth.