Eco-design : an innovative tool for sustainable chemistry

Our society recently realized – on a global scale – that it was mortgaging its collective future to satisfy its appetite for individual wealth. As long as there were only a few hundred million of us on Earth, sharing most of the wealth and generating most of the anthropogenic pollution, the – criticizable – balance was maintained. But with the arrival in recent decades of almost three billion people who rightly claim –– to have a high level of consumption, and with the prospect of an increase in the world's population in the years ahead, the international community is calling for sustainable development to enable a new, truly sustainable balance to be established. This balance must be based on a rational use of our resources, whatever they may be, insofar as the notion of the renewal capacity of any resource is intimately linked to the speed of its consumption. These notions therefore determine in part the foundations of sustainable development as defined by :

• a rate of consumption of renewable resources that does not exceed their capacity to regenerate;

• a rate of consumption of non-renewable resources that does not exceed the rate of development of substitute resources;

• production of no more waste and pollution than the environment can absorb.

And these notions of sustainable rates of resource consumption and waste production are in fact to be found in the holistic approach of eco-design, which aims to reduce the environmental impact of a product or process at source.