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The Takeda Award 2001 for World Environmental Well-Being is awarded to Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek and Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker for "The development and promotion of the Ecological Rucksacks and Material Input Per unit Service (MIPS) concepts, as measures of the ecological stress of products and services."
Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek presented the ecological rucksacks and MIPS concepts
in 1993 as broad measures of environmental stress. Mankind has benefited
enormously from nature during the progression to rich societies characterized by material wealth. At the same time, the pursuit
of this type of prosperity has caused great destruction in the process
of obtaining and using natural resources as in excavating, extracting
natural resources, and channeling water from rivers and lakes for
irrigation, among other activities. Schmidt-Bleek has proposed that
such dislocation of natural materials is the fundamental cause of
environmental damage. Therefore, all products and services used by
people carry a "rucksack" of all the materials displaced or processed
during the life-cycle of that product or service.
This creative concept was invented by
Schmidt-Bleek and termed the "ecological rucksack." There is an Ecological
Rucksack associated with each product that is calculated to indicate
the weight of all materials displaced in the production of the
good or service. Schmidt-Bleek developed a second indicator known
as Material Input Per unit Service, or MIPS, which is the ratio of
the ecological rucksack value per unit of service provided. MIPS reflects
the "real" value of goods and services, and attempts to place these
in the economic product function. By associating on MIPS value with
each product, company, government, and individual, it becomes possible to take into
account the environmental stress created by the production of these
products.
Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker, who was
president (1991-2000) of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment
and Energy, invited Schmidt-Bleek to the Institute to develop
these concepts further. Following the collaboration between von Weizsaecker and Schmidt-Bleek,
the ecological rucksacks and MIPS concepts were refined further to connect resource productivity with energy efficiency (mainly
limited to the production process of raw materials), and clarify
the relationship between those concepts and toxicity or hazards.
Von Weizsaecker wrote a book, Factor
4, which introduced these important concepts globally. The Wuppertal
Institute continues to make great efforts to disseminate these
concepts and promote the collection of basic data with which to calculate MIPS in collaboration with Schmidt-Bleek.
As a result of this line of investigation,
adverse environmental stresses can be reduced by designing MIPS to
lower values, i.e. taking smaller ecological rucksack values or larger service
values for each product. The values of ecological rucksack, and MIPS
are simple measures indicated by weight, and, therefore, they have practical
use in industrial fields.
Although MIPS is an approximate value,
its use makes it possible to understand complex environmental stresses
comprehensively. It is hoped that the use of MIPS will increase the awareness
of the environmental stress of different products and services, and
eventually intertwine the marketability of a product with its environmental
stress. That is, the use of MIPS will influence economic activities
by reflecting the true cost of goods and services, including the costs of environmental
stress.
For these reasons, the development of
the ecological rucksacks and MIPS measures represent an important milestone
towards creating a sustainable society. The Takeda Foundation honors
this achievement for its technological creativity and bestows upon this achievement the
Takeda Award. |
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