recommendation 3: ensure establishment of academic centres of excellence Government, in co-operation with business, needs to sponsor centres of academic excellence on product and process assessment which will help to stimulate product and process innovation and generate business tools for translating closed-loop strategic aims into economically-viable business solutions. These centres need to be backed up by appropriate Research Council programmes and in-company research, as well as Germanstyle technology introduction programmes and mechanisms for business learning. Businesses should be encouraged to help pay for research. There is also an urgent need to focus research and collect data on broader issues related to product policy, for instance understanding resource flows. Organisations like the Design Council have a crucial role to play. The Japanese experience of such bodies, which suggest the level of research and alignment with emerging agendas is greater than in the UK or Europe, may be worth studying in more detail.51
recommendation 4: make business responsible for understanding and reducing impacts, in line with the overall ‘closed-loop’ objective There are a number of approaches that could underpin this basic strategy: • A product rating approach could be employed based on three or four key parameters: tackling as priorities energy use, water use, hazardous materials and disposal considerations. These could be developed into specific product standards as knowledge and ownership of the impacts develops among industries. The ratings approach appears to have worked well for white goods and could be extended to other domestic goods and large consumables such as televisions, monitors, PC’s, printers and cookers.52 • Up-front product levies could further increase the incentive to ‘close the loop’ particularly if graduated to encourage longer life, easier repair, modularity and upgradeability. See Box 5: A graduated product tax – some ideas. • Target-based waste prevention policies designed to reduce particular material or energy uses, with implementation negotiated with leading companies, and big costs attached to missing targets. Long-term targets are good for innovation. This would complement increasing landfill tax by providing reduction incentives at both the production and disposal ends of system. Sectoral sustainability strategies might help with developing targets, by identifying, and negotiating with, industries with the greatest impacts. • Greater use of codes of practice and benchmarking, which would be a low cost means of encouraging progress. Benchmarking mechanisms would be designed to hit the worst performers. For example, any product which is, say, 20 per cent less efficient than the market leader could be deemed not fit for purpose and possibly subject to bans or levies. Ranking initiatives might include having some measure of product life-cycle incorporated into the FTSE4Good Index, or a ‘name and shame’ league endorsed by government. This might encourage, and ultimately require, more reporting of product lifecycle information in annual reports.
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The ideal model is of a body that would set objectives, use a suite of instruments with the powers to deploy them, and alongside winning the confidence and co-operation of businesses, have the resources for rigorous enforcement where needed. By contrast to this aspiration, the UK Government’s proposal to establish a voluntary business forum to drive progress on the design objectives of the WEEE Directive is wholly inadequate.50