Towards Clean Production: Concepts and Principles for Guiding TechnologicalChoice Towards Sustainable Development

摘要

Central to the question of sustainable development is the need to define aframework within which both products and processes will remain compatible with environmental health. Broadly speaking, this goal has been captured by the phrase clean (or sometimes cleaner) production. The problem of clean production is a little like the problem of sustainable development: everyone knows that we want it; nobody knows exactly what it is. In the literature, the term 'clean' has often been employed to refer to a variety of technological processes including process-integrated preventive measures, end-of-pipe abatement measures, and remediation or clean-up measures. The goal-oriented concept of clean production does not yet give us clear prescriptive indicators with which to guide technological choice. This paper sets out the background to the search for such indicators. It emphasizes the importance of precaution, prevention and integration, and discusses the role of ecology and thermodynamics in providing principles for clean production.