At the Wuppertal Institute in Germany we worked out the ecological rucksacks for some 150 or so base materials. It's far from enough. In the building industry alone we should know about 2,000 such numbers in order to compare the "ecological price" for different types of buildings accurately. We don't know these numbers at this moment, but we are confident that the development goes in the right direction. Those rucksacks that have been enumerated can be found on the web site of the Wuppertal institute and in a number of books by myself and others. The German government has given us to understand that it considers establishing a National Center for Rucksack Factors and Material Flows as proposed by the Factor 10 Innovation Network in 2000. Let me give you a few and perhaps surprising examples what one discovers when applying the rucksack concept. Take a one family house with about 110 square meters in Germany and make the assumption that it will last for 80 years. Now how many resources are being used for building and maintaining this house in good repair and how much is used for keeping it heated in the winter during all these years? The answer is that oil heating requires barley 10 of the natural resources in % by weight, not counting the consumption of water in the house. These finding would suggest that the overriding policy concern with climatic change may need adjustments if society wishes to focus on sustainability. Building a catalytic converter for an automobile with virgin platinum requires close to three tons of non-renewable nature. Assuming that this equipment functions for 100 000 km, some 30 grams of nature are consumed for every km driven, or 3 kg per 100 km. This consumption is not so different in weight from the fuel consumption of the vehicle. And the catalyst has been legally prescribed to protect the environment. That's what I call a mono-linear non-systemic solution. As you know, considerable efforts are made and large subsidies are being paid today for introducing photovoltaic as a source of renewable energy. Lots of efforts are going on to use this energy source for driving cars, boats and what not. So we calculated the system-wide material intensity of the known electricity producing schemes and found that photovoltaic is not a good option at all for approaching sustainability because it is extremely material and energy intensive. We also discovered that the conversion of lignite into electricity shows a resource productivity 50 times lower than wind-generated power. In Germany, the major source of electric power is lignite coal. Information Technology is frequently hailed as one of the most important development for reaching sustainability. While many of its advanced applications point in this direction, the presently available equipment itself is far too resource intensive to lead the way to an ecological future. Its rucksack is about 8 to 10 times higher than that of the average rucksack of things like cars and washing machines, namely more than 300. In addition, its lifetime is far too limited. I will now say a few words about MIPS, the second concept that is mentioned by the Takeda Foundation for bestowing the World Environment Award 2001. We usually express rucksacks of products by MI, the Material Inputs from cradle to the point of sale minus the own weight of the products. We re-calculate all energy inputs in terms of material inputs and add it to MI. That means for example when fossils are used, we use their weight. For electricity we have computed the system-wide material intensities as indicated a little while ago. And for solar thermal systems we compute the MI per unit heat output. Now, the "ecological price" of a product, its MI, says nothing about the resources needed for generating utility, or fun, or value. Short-lived equipment may have a smaller rucksack than a high quality product and a car that transports 5 people has clearly a smaller rucksack than a train. It is for this reason that I proposed MIPS, the cradle to grave Material Input Per unit Service extracted as a more adequate ecological measure. MI divided by S. This puts things in perspective and allows the direct comparison of the "ecological price per unit value obtainable" for all products providing a similar service. All modes of transport can thus be directly compared, from walking to using a plane or a Zeppelin. And by the way, S divided by MI is the resource productivity. Unfortunately, resource productivity is not considered an important production factor by many modern economists. They are apparently quite content to consider capital and labor only as the important production factors. I have asked myself many times why the prices for things on the market are given in costs per unit at point of sale? Consumers cannot possibly know the true costs of the utility they may gain from putting those gizmos to work. Expensive cloth or cars may in fact be less costly than the cheap stuff when considering the COPS, the COsts Per unit Service. Maybe the often-announced service society will correct this blind spot of our economies. We have used MIPS for designing new products, for dematerializing services, for making ecological choices among the offers on the market. We have used MIPS for judging the ecological value of "environmental technologies", research efforts and recycling systems, just to mention a few areas where this concept can be helpful.