The market
It is estimated that the World Environmental goods and services sector (BSE) will reach the astronomical sum of $ 635 billion in 2010, an impressive growth of 45 % in the past five years. By 2020, it could reach a thousand billion dollars. BSE-related consulting services represent approximately 5 % of the total, or $ 32.7 billion today, ranging from advice on renewable energies, waste reduction, eco-design, carbon trade and Realization of life analysis studies (ACV). We expect the market to reach $ 45 billion by 2015, which is a huge opportunity for employment and business spirit. Currently, it is estimated that the EU, the United States and Japan represent 94 % of the world market. While British companies seem to have a strong position among the actors of the EU, the Scandinavian consulting companies thrive thanks to their decades of pioneer environmental policies in their country and to a high demand for technological innovations. French law provides that from 2011, all the products sold in France must be the subject of an environmental declaration of product (EPD), which will stimulate the turnover of consulting firms in the environment, especially in life cycle analysis (ACV). ACV advice offers a complete method of calculating the environmental impact. This supports purchase decisions and allows consumers to link ecological results to them to buy. More EU members are expected to continue the same strategy as France. This will stimulate even higher growth in the development of consulting companies. Companies like ERM, RPS, around and WSP have emerged in the last decade with more than 1,000 experts each on the list of employees, and dozens of offices distributed worldwide. The United Kingdom alone has more than 600 companies that offer environmental consulting services, and at least 75 of them have branches outside the British islands. The United Kingdom-one of the few countries to have collected detailed statistics on this expanding activity-estimates that in 2009, its companies participated in more than 242,000 global contracts, more than 60 % of which came from the 'outside of the United Kingdom.
Innovation
The business model of environmental products and services has been limited to containing the negative effects of production and consumption. Standard jargon speaks of attenuation, protection, reduction. It is necessary to "do less harm" to "do more good". This is a major breakthrough, because any attempt at preservation is unlikely to succeed in regenerating, and any attenuation strategy is unlikely to manage to improve. It is in this context that a new portfolio of environmental services is necessary, identifying innovation opportunities using the available resources. When Professor Luigi Bistagnino, dean of the industrial design school of the Faculty of Architecture of Politecnico Di Torino (Italy), embarked on a first cycle program to teach eco-design, he refused to 'Adopt the simple approach "steal less". Professor Bistagnino argued that even if we never appreciate someone who promises to fly less, we award environmental prices to companies that pollute less. Students were very impressed by the logic according to which to fly less equivalent to polluting less, the two continue to fly and pollute. This approach opens the way to a fundamental change in industrial design and allows the emergence of new economic models. This simple evaluation led Mr. Bistagnino to create a new type of ACV, starting with an assessment of performance based on traditional input/output tables which list all the elements necessary to produce a product or a service, and quantify all the results, including waste flows. This is part of a traditional ISO 14,000 certification. However, Mr. Bistagnino teaches his students that all the outputs that are left without use must now find an entry, thus creating the input/output tables. This offers a creative platform for hundreds of business ideas. As the design students ventured through materials and figures, they realized that a large amount of value of value is simply waste. These evaluations made it possible to rethink the management of multilayer packaging, ball bearings and even the city wastewater.
The first cash flow
The first company that benefited from this new type of ACV concerns the use of glass compared to plastic. The traditional ACV favors plastic containers because these are lighter, therefore less energy-gourmet, which creates less greenhouse gas. Consequently, around the world, plastic packaging for liquids has won a dominant market share compared to glass packaging and multilayer systems. However, depending on the logic presented at Politecnico di Torino, glass can be recycled in glass foam, and this building material eliminates the need for additional insulation, the use of flame delay, the application of fungicides and Waterproofing. The higher energy expenditure for drinking containers is more than offset by the savings of chemicals and building materials thanks to the multifunctionality of glass foam which, in addition to that, needs CO2 in its process production. The situation is still improving when the energy required to foam the glass is supplied by methane from the landfit site, where most of the glass is deposited against remuneration. This not only changes the conclusions of the ACV which clearly favors glass compared to plastic, but even changes the foundations of the economic model: being paid to use waste, use the available energy available without needing storage or transport . This is a whole new competitive model that recalls the blue economy: use what you have. It is not surprising that three industrial investments have already been successfully made in this area.
The opportunity
If environmental advisory companies around the world are ready to go beyond current strategic assessments and advice, it will then be possible to put our production and consumption system on the path of sustainability. Consulting companies can move from the reduction in carbon footprint and cost reduction in the identification of new opportunities, making high quality products cheaper, generating multiple income and profits beyond net profit. While Professor Bistagnino has only a few hundred undergraduate students, a group of two dozen masters have graduated. By the beginning of 2011, the first doctorates will be awarded by creating a pool of highly skilled consultants, capable of designing competitive production systems in terms of quality, price and environmental performance, thus contributing social development. We hope that by 2020, the first 200,000 contracts will have been awarded, generating thousands of jobs beyond the world of environmental advisory services as it is practiced today. These new advisory companies go beyond the exploitation of low labor costs somewhere in the world, pushing the supply chain even further in price concessions, thus reaching further in the Third World for inexpensive inputs. These ecosystem designers will allow companies to be more efficient thanks to the creative use of available resources inspired by the way in which nutrients, materials and energy ecosystems.
