Publications Takeda World Environment Award 2001
Schmidt-Bleek receives the Takeda World Environment Award 2001
for the "Proposal, promotion and implementation of the MIPS and ecological rucksack concept".
"I developed the MIPS and ecological rucksack concept to make sure
that we can produce wealth for all the people on this planet and still live
in peace with nature", said Bio Schmidt-Bleek, the President of the
Factor 10 Institute at Carnoules, Provence and recent winner of the Takeda
World Environment Award. "Unfortunately, current economic and environmental
policies will not get us to a sustainable future." he continues and
explains that the major problem today is that we reward those who waste
natural resources through old fashioned fiscal policies and punish those
who hire people for work.
"Still", he adds "there are already today a number of forward looking companies who increase the resource productivity of their products and services. They go in this direction because they want to be still in business in 10 or 20 years in a world that simply does not have enough resources to globalize the present western life style for 8 or 10 billion people. Today, many tons of non-renewable nature are wasted just to produce a single PC". In Schmidt-Bleeks language, PC’c carry an enormous "ecological rucksack".
Schmidt-Bleek’s concept calls for considerable economic, social and technical innovation to satisfy people’s needs with much less input of natural resources than today - at least a factor 10 - for generating the same - or even better - value or utility as output. This relationship he calls MIPS - Material Input Per unit Service - and he uses it as a design principle and to measure and compare the "ecological price" of all goods, infrastructures and services.
The Takeda Foundation in Japan is a new foundation that promotes the creation
and application of engineering intellect and knowledge. The monetary value
for the award is 100 million Japanese yen in three fields. Schmidt-Bleek
received the "Takeda World Environment Award" for the "Proposal,
promotion and implementation of the MIPS and ecological rucksack concept",
together with Ernst Ulrich von Weizsaecker".