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A future-oriented and sustainable "Leasing Society" is based on a combination of new and innovative serviceoriented business models, changed product and material ownership structures, increased and improved eco-design efforts, and reverse logistic structures. Together these elements have the potential to change the relationship between producers and consumers, and thereby create a new incentive structure in the economy regarding the use and re-use of resources. While the consumer in a leasing society buys a service (instead of a product), the producer in a leasing society retains the ownership of the product (instead of selling it) and sells the service of using the product. This creates producer incentives to re-use, remanufacture, and recycle products and materials and could become a cornerstone of the circular economy, depending on how the leasing society is implemented. While a predominantly positive picture of the success of a leasing society model and related business cases emerges from the bigger part of the available literature, this paper argues that the resource efficiency of respective business cases is highly dependent on the specific business case design. This paper develops a more cautious and differentiated definition of the leasing society by discussing relevant mechanisms and success factors of leasing society business cases. The leasing society is discussed from a micro business-oriented and a macro environment-oriented perspective complemented by a discussion of conditions for successful business models that reduce environmental impacts and resource footprints.
Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) has matured over the past decades and become part of the broader field of sustainability assessment. To strengthen LCA as a tool and eventually increase its usefulness for sustainability decision-making, it is argued that there is a need to expand the ISO LCA framework by integration and connection with other concepts and methods. This paper explores the potential options for deepening and broadening the LCA methodologies beyond the current ISO framework for improved sustainability analysis. By investigating several environmental, economic and social assessment methods, the paper suggests some options for incorporating (parts of) other methods or combining with other methods for broadening and deepening the LCA.
Northrhine-Westphalia (NRW) is the largest land of the Federal Republic of Germany. Until the 1970ies the Ruhr-area with a population of about 12 million people and a strong coal, steel and chemical industry had been plagued with severe pollution. In the 1970ies environmental protection had emerged on the international and national policy agendas. The federal and regional government launched massive legislative and economic public interventions for cleaning-up rivers, soils and air. As a result, a highly competitive eco-industry emerged. The article outlines main features of ecoindustries, the structural change of the Ruhr area and regional economic cluster policies in support of eco-industries in NRW. It draws conclusions for eco-industry policy developing from end-of-pipe towards integrated preventive approaches.