For buyers green innovations provide a competitive advantage, as long as the environmental benefits are genuine
Environmental added value is defined as a more beneficial or less adverse environmental impact of a technology considered from the perspective of its life cycle compared to solutions with similar function currently used applied in a similar situation to address a given problem (e.g. established, commercially available technologies).
It reflects the contribution of the product, process or service to environmental sustainability beyond what is legally or traditionally required to emphasize the positive environmental outcomes achieved.
Demonstration of an environmental added value by a technology is a key element of the ETV application process allowing to state if a technology complies to the defintion of an environmental technology and can can be verified under ETV.
How ETV determines if a technology is green?
Comparison to relative alternatives
In order to demonstrate and assess the environmental added value of a novel environmental technology it is essential to compare its environmental impacts and aspects whether positive or negative with the impacts and aspects of relative alternatives i.e. solutions with the same function currently used in similar situation.
The relevant alternative should refer to a technology that is both current and commercially available. It should be legal and accepted by the end-users on the specific targeted market
In ETV, each technology applying for ETV is benchamrked againts alternatives that are carefully assessed for adequacy and relevance of comparison.
Life-cycle perspective
The environmental added value is assessed from the life cycle perspective meaning that the assessment focuses as much as possible on a holistic view of the environmental impacts of a technology during its entire life-cycle.
It involves identification of these life stages of a technology: from the extraction of raw materials, manufacturing process, use and maintenance, until the end of life of related equipment or products where differences (both positive and negative) in environmental impacts of the technology are likely to occur in comparison to the relevant alternatives.
In ETV the focus is on identifying these life stages of a technology where most signifficant differences are likely to occur.
If results from life-cycle inventories (LCI) or assessments (LCA) are available, then they can be used but the life-cycle perspective approach used for ETV does not require any life-cycle assessments or calculations on the impact of the technology. Therefore, the “life-cycle perspective” should help at least to qualitatively determine if a technology provides an environmental added-value at the cost of much higher use of consumables, energy or water, or at the cost of higher pollution in other aspects of its life-cycle, when compared to a relevant alternative.
Environmental aspects and impacts considered
The environmental aspects considered for the technology life stages concerned in the environmental added value assessment include:
- emission of greenhouse gases,
- emission of pollutants to the air, water and soil,
- use of resources,
- use of energy (incl. from renewable sources),
- water consumption and associated processes,
- generation of waste, incl. hazardous waste.
The environmental added value assessment may also include additional parameters on the overall productivity of the technology relevant e.g. for the circular procurement, for example:
- production efficiency – productivity, i.e. the differences in productivity of the technology vs. the relevant alternative, (e.g. for recycling: ratio of substance recycled vs. quantity of substance contained in the waste),
- production efficiency – final quality i.e. the differences in the quality of the final product vs. the relevant alternative (e.g. for recycling: the level of purity of the recovered substance).
Environmental added value assessment
The assessment conisist in an analysis whether the positive environmental aspects of the technology qualitatively outweigh the negative aspects in comparison to a relative alternative. The impacts identified for the individual life stages of a technology are weighted and „scored” as:
- Major negative differences in comparison to the relevant alternative (–)
- Significant negative differences in comparison to the relevant alternative (-)
- No significant differences in comparison to the relevant alternative (0)
- Significant positive differences in comparison to the relevant alternative (+)
- Major positive differences in comparison to the relevant alternative (++)
- Not relevant (NR)Not available (NA).
The assessment is done based to a maximum possible extend on quantitative data for these stages that are most relevant to demonstrate the reduced environmental impact and thus provide a quantified picture of the overall technical and environmental performance of the technology. To ensure a clear understanding of the comparison between the technology to be verified and the relative alternative, whenever possible common indicators are used that can measure the performance of both technologies. For example , one can assess the parameter Emission of pollutants to water, using an indicator: % of reduction of pollutants in wastewater in relation to mass of filtering materials used .
The assessment may also supplement the specification of the performance to be verified by identifying additional environmental parameters that are relevant for the technology so as to ensure credibility, transparency and complexity of the information provided by ETV. It is particularly important when it could be expected that these negative aspects may put in question the environmental added value of the technology