Japanese Environmental Award to the Fathers of the "Ecological Rucksack"

At the Wuppertal Institute the former vice-president Prof. Dr. Friedrich Schmidt-Bleek developed the concept of the "ecological rucksack". Because of this outstanding idea, he and the founding president of the Wuppertal Institute and Member of the German Bundestag, Prof. Dr. Ernst Ulrich von Weizsäcker, will together receive one of three newly donated Takeda awards, the one for outstanding technological and entrepreneurial efforts to promote the environment. The Takeda award will be given to both winners equally for the "Proposal, promotion and implementation of the MIPS and ecological rucksack concept". The award ceremony will take place on December 3rd and 4th in Tokyo.

Schmidt-Bleek's concept calls for considerable economic, social and technical innovation to satisfy people's needs with much less input of natural resources than today - at least a factor 10 - while generating the same - or even better - value or utility as output. This relationship between material input to service output he calls MIPS - Material Input Per unit Service - and he uses it as a design principle and to measure and compare the "ecological price" of all goods, infrastructures and services.

"I developed the MIPS and ecological rucksack concept to make sure that we can produce wealth for all the people on this planet and still live in peace with nature," said Bio Schmidt-Bleek, the President of the Factor 10 Institute at Carnoules, Provence. "Unfortunately, current economic and environmental policies will not get us to a sustainable future," he continues and explains that the major problem today is that we reward those who waste natural resources through old-fashioned fiscal policies and punish those who hire people for work.

"Still," he adds "there are already today a number of forward looking companies who increase the resource productivity of their products and services. They go in this direction because they want to be still in business in 10 or 20 years in a world that simply does not have enough resources to globalize the present western life style for 8 or 10 billion people. Today, many tons of non-renewable nature are wasted just to produce a single PC." According to the term Schmidt-Bleek invented, PC's carry an enormous "ecological rucksack".

In his first reaction Prof. von Weizsäcker was delighted and thanked his friend Schmidt-Bleek and the "fantastic team" at the Wuppertal Institute. He also acknowledged the decision of the founder, the 78 year old inventor and engineer Dr. Ikuo Takeda, not to donate the award to basic research but to dedicate it to practical improvements.

The MIPS concept still plays an important role in the work of the Wuppertal Institute, whether in the working group "eco-efficient enterprises" or in the project "MIPS for Kids". The Wuppertal Institute shares the happiness of the two winners and feels its ten year's work to be confirmed by this honour.

Press release by Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment and Energy

in the Science Centre North Rhine-Westphalia

Responsible: Prof. Dr. Peter Hennicke, President

Contact: Dorle Riechert, Public Relations

Tel. +49 (0)202 2492-180, Fax +49 (0)202 2492-108

E-mail: pr@wupperinst.org