CHANGES IN ENVIRONMENTAL STRATEGIES AND PREMISES FOR INDUSTRIAL PRODUCTION - AN OVERVIEW Professor

The presentation gives an overview of present major changes in the environmental strategies and external premises for industrial environmental performance. Such changes are discussed in the lights of increasing waste and resource problems, the shift from environmental control to avoidance technologies, long-term perspectives and systems thinking, and the understanding of fundamental thermodynamic principles in order to minimise lost work and entropy production in general. This leads to the recognising of Industrial Ecology as a systems oriented concept for how to approach environmental challenges in industrial society. The change from a command-and-control regulation policy to market-based and consensus-seeking regulation strategies strongly affects the strategic and operational environmental management in industry. The key element of present industrial environmental efforts is pollution prevention by cleaner production measures. However, there is a need to make improvements beyond the "good housekeeping" level, by integrating prevention options in process design and product design, at macro-, mesoor microscales. In order to deal with such issues in a systematic way industry now is about to implement environmental management systems, environmental auditing and product life-cycle assessment, as decision support and organisational tools in order to push industrial environmental performance towards higher levels. The paper discusses such strategies and activities as elements of a new overall concept: the "environmental life-cycle engineering" concept, where the aim is to integrate preventative, environmental and life-cycle thinking as key elements of engineering disciplines.