Contrasting approaches to the generation of environmental improvement options for production systems

This article reviews two common types of improvement tools presently used in industry to identify opportunities to prevent or at least to reduce the environmental impacts of production systems and processes. Despite their proven ability to result in appropriate environmental improvement options in different industry sectors, their successful application is hampered by the fact that these tools do not take the specific causes of the environmental impacts of the production process into account, i.e. the question of which process features cause the environmental impacts of the production process is not raised nor is the flexibility for change of the production system taken into consideration. This paper sets the stage for a new generation of improvement tools, based on an environmental diagnosis of the production system. The diagnosis aims to result in a thorough understanding of the production system to guide and drive the identification of environmental improvement options that specifically target process-, product-, and site-specific environmental conditions. Alternative ways to develop such a diagnostic approach on the basis of presently used tools are being explored, and a synthesis thereof is proposed to achieve synergy between these contrasting approaches.