Manufacturing

the growth in manufacturing at present. They too have harmful environmental impacts if hazardous chemicals and metals in production and final disposal are not carefully managed.

Historically, GDP has grown more rapidly than material, energy and labour inputs required to produce it. This has been owing to a combination of structural change, as service consumption sectors have grown faster than material consumption, technical change, which, has reduced material and labour inputs (e.g. automation) per unit of production, and more stringent environmental policies, which have driven up the cost of using some pollution-intensive inputs. This resulted, among others, in relative decoupling of resource input from output and absolute decoupling of some of the associated environmental pressures. Yet resource- efficiency gains have been offset by economic and population growth:

overall emissions, energy use and material use continued to grow despite lower emissions, energy and material use per unit output (Figure 2). Without absolute decoupling, continuous economic growth implies continuously higher energy and resource demands, to levels that put the health of our natural resource base at risk.

The greening of manufacturing is essential to any effort to decouple environmental pressure from economic growth. Green manufacturing differs from conventional manufacturing in that it aims to reduce the amount of natural resources needed to produce finished goods through more energy- and materials-efficient manufacturing processes that also reduce the negative externalities associated with waste and pollution. This includes more efficient transport and logistics, which can also account for a significant percentage of the total environmental impact of manufactured products.

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