Eco-Efficiency – The New Dimension of Economic Efficiency
Journal Title: RECENT - Year 2009, Vol 10, Issue 27
Abstract
Over the past decades, human activity has changed the world’s environment more extensively than ever before. Slowly, the people became sensitive to the needs of our environment. Nowadays, it is clear: in order to be sustainable, economic development must respect the environment. All over the world (but especially in Europe), people, companies and governments attach an overwhelming importance to protecting the environment. At macroeconomic level, more and more policies focus on environment protection. At microeconomics level, in order to have success in the long-run, companies cannot neglect the environmental dimension of business development. More and more companies use environment friendly technologies and present them as a strong competitive advantage, in their commercials and advertisings. The World Business Council for Sustainable Development (WBCSD) developed the concept of eco-efficiency. This concept covers a wide range of measures by which companies have reduced their environmental impacts and also their costs. The use of eco-efficiency indicators allows us to avoid the traditional problem referring to the fact that environmental performance indicators might fluctuate as a result of changes in production volume and thus hide real changes in environmental performance. The paper analyses the way Europeans see sustainable development and their initiatives oriented towards achieving the symbiosis between economic development and environment protection. From these initiatives, we focus especially on the micro-economic measures. We investigate the ecological way of doing business, and we measure the eco-efficiency of several well-known companies, trying to outline the solutions that work best, solutions that could be used by the Romanian companies in order to increase their eco-efficiency.
Authors and Affiliations
Diana BĂRGLĂZAN, Anca DRĂGHICI, Mihaela VARTOLOMEI
Keywords
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