In a way this is not a strikingly innovative idea because, as everyone knows who produces something, or who runs a household, who runs a company, you should consider the input side, the costs, before you can run your business economically. Obviously you have to know first how much money you have available before you can spend it. So that's not terribly new. However, when you look at our environmental legislation, even at environmental policies today, you notice that it is largely addressing what we have to do in order to avoid bad environmental consequences from the things we blow into the air, put into the water or dispose as waste once the fun is over, at the end of the economic activities. In fact, if you look at that from an economic point of view, you would have to argue that in 1970-1972 we started a wonderfully planned economy in the West, and nobody ever calls it by that name. We decided to build an additional economy that was to clean up the original economy which was there, and still is there, to create wealth. This, of course, could only happen by legislation, harmonized by agreements within OECD, within other forums, and within the European Community in order to spread the non-productive load. And almost every time we added legislation, the costs went up for additional technology, for more bureaucracy, for more control. We have created more than 1,000 pieces of legislation in Brussels for the European Union to regulate what we should or should not be doing for the sake of protecting the environment. In my judgment more than 90 percent of that legislation does not help at all to increase or secure wealth. In fact, a good part of that legislation prevents making progress toward sustainability. One of the reasons is that it addresses problems as they arise one by one at the tail end of the economy rather than addressing in a systematic way the root causes for what's wrong with our economy. This kind of policy requires enormous investments in non-productive and expensive "environmental technology" that swallows up huge natural resources and energy in and by itself. Look, for instance at the clean-up technology of a coal burning power plant. The plant size has about doubled since the early 70ies without helping, but rather reducing its efficiency. Now, lets go back to the simple idea of managing the input side in order to have better control over the outputs. The first question you have to answer is whether you can produce comparable outputs, comparable wealth, with less nature as input. Because it is clear that neither you in Japan, nor we, nor the Americans or anybody who has reached "an OECD level" of lifestyle would ever be prepared to give up on that. We are not prepared to give up on clothes. We are not prepared to give up on hotels and rooms like the one we meet in today. We are not prepared to give up on mobility, housing, on security, on medical care. So we have to start with this question: Can we, in fact, create technology which could give us essentially all we are used to, maybe in different forms but, basically, without losing end use satisfaction - and still use a lot less natural resources on the input side? The answer is yes, we could. But the approach to technology has to change. In all cases we need to define first the wants and needs of people and then create the "service delivery machines" that can do the job with the least possible need for space, materials, and energy from cradle to grave. Engineers are not trained to ask and respond to this question, neither are architects or dentists. And even if trained to do so, the economy as it is today would rarely give them a chance to minimize the inputs without losing profits. I will come back to that. There is a first step we all can take to lower the input of nature without much effort and without too much of a risk of running away costs. Here I come to speak about the "ecological rucksack", one of the magic words used in the Takeda reasoning for the Award. What are these "rucksacks"? It stands to reason that every input material used in industry has an economic history reaching back to its geological origin. This history is reflected in its market price. Equally, every base material has an ecological history before it can be used to build a "service delivery machine". Space has to be made available for its extraction, overburdens have to be removed, ores have to be mined, crushed, extracted, and transported, earth has to be plowed, water has to be used and so on. When you take copper for instance, 500 tons of non-renewable nature has to be put in motion to gain one ton of copper. So its rucksack is said to be 500/1 or 500. Aluminum shows a rucksack of 85, paper 15, steel from 4 to more than 20, and plastics from 4 to about 10. Paper is not 1.5 to four times more expensive per unit weight than plastics, and aluminum does not cost 7 times less than copper. So when economists calculate the resource input in market price per kg only, its "ecological price" remains regularly hidden. This means that making money today is heavily subsidized by nature.