PW01 Assessment
Exhibit Hall
8:00 AM - Wednesday
(PW004) Assessing Sustainability using BASF's Eco-efficiency Analysis.
Wall-Markowski, C1, Kicherer, A2, 1 BASF Corporation, Mount Olive, New Jersey, USA2 BASF AG, Ludwigshafen, Germany
ABSTRACT- In today′s world, environmental, economic and social impacts of business activities is becoming ever more critical. How does a company ensure that sustainability is valued and addressed? BASF does this in many ways, from promoting values and principles that support sustainability from upper management levels throughout the company, to using specific tools such as eco-efficiency analysis. This presentation will explain eco-efficiency analysis, highlight a case study, and introduce the SEE-Balance®, which includes the social aspect of sustainability. BASF′s eco-efficiency methodology was developed in 1996 and to date over 220 analyses have been completed. It is based upon the principles of ISO 14040, with additional enhancements that allow the results to be used as a concise decision-making tool. Six environmental categories are evaluated: raw materials consumption, energy consumption, land use, air, water and solid waste emissions, toxic potential of the substances employed and released, potential for misuse, and risk potential. Life-cycle data are compiled for each of these categories, a weighting scheme is used to aggregate the results, and they are normalized in order to generate the ecological fingerprint. The fingerprint depicts the relative impacts of the alternatives in each of the environmental categories. An economic analysis is also done to address costs over the life-cycle of the product. The economic results are then combined with the environmental results to obtain the portfolio. The portfolio depicts the relative environmental impacts of the alternatives on one axis, and similarly, the relative economic impacts on the second axis. Thus the relative eco-efficiencies of the alternatives are concisely shown. SEE-Balance® is a tool developed by BASF that encompasses the environmental, economic and social impacts of products and processes. This tool will be introduced in this session.
Key words: basf, see-balance®, eco-efficiency, sustainability