Industry and Entrepreneurship
Green Growth
Opportunities for sustainable growth and jobs
Now more than ever, Europe needs new sources of growth. With the global population increasing by more than 70 million every year, the consumption of goods, and demand for energy and raw materials will increase exponentially. A transition to a more sustainable, resource efficient and low carbon economy is necessary. We need to ensure that industrial, climate, energy, environmental and other relevant policies are coherent and create the right conditions for innovation and investment.
We need to fully exploit the business opportunities that will be created in the transition to a sustainable economy. The global market for environmental protection also represents a big opportunity for European firms. Currently, the global market for environmental goods and services is estimated to be around €1000 billion per annum - and this is expected to double or even triple by 2020. In an increasingly resource constrained world, it is clear that resource efficiency can give a competitive edge to companies as well as countries. It is encouraging to see that, in Europe, significant decoupling of economic growth and environmental impact has already been achieved and is continuing. Estimates of worldwide potential savings and returns from capturing resource productivity potential runs to trillions of euros.
"Much can be done to make the way we consume and produce in Europe more sustainable. This can be done without additional costs for European companies and consumers and can bring benefits, either through energy and natural resources savings or by grasping new opportunities offered by a "green" economy."
To sustain decent livelihoods as well as clean neighbourhoods, we need economically successful companies developing improved products, processes and systems. Europe already produces some world leading environmental technologies and services and captures around one third of the world market. Our core environmental industries - active in pollution management and control, waste collection and treatment, renewable energy and recycling - provide over 3 million jobs in Europe.
We need to act on two key fields: efficiency (the optimisation of processes) - and circularity. This means using an integrated industrial system that identifies business opportunities that leverage underutilised resources: materials, energy, water, capacity, expertise, assets etc. Major gains can be achieved by innovation in process efficiency, product design and value chain optimisation.
Process efficiency can ensure the development of longer-term solutions to reduce fossil fuel intensity in industrial processes, radically reduce manufacturing resource intensity and substantially eliminate industrial waste.
A wealth of material and energy is embedded in products. Encouraging the supply of and the demand for more resource efficient products makes business and environmental sense. The Commission’s Ecodesign directive has the potential to deliver savings of up to €90bn per year and 1 million jobs. Although energy has been the main resource targeted so far, the directive is looking at all environmental aspects and taking a life-cycle perspective.
Finished goods are often made from the inputs of multiple businesses or subcontractors and significant waste can result from incompatible specifications. There is therefore much potential in value chain optimisation whereby industries or companies in the value chain find synergies to help them work with each other.
Green growth and the creation of resource efficient products can also provide EU companies with business opportunities worldwide. My 2013 “Mission for Green Growth” to China, highlighted how EU businesses with well-developed expertise on environmentally friendly products and services are sought after by Chinese companies.
The European Commission is currently collecting stakeholders’ views in a public consultation on the most effective support measures to help small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) to become more resource efficient.