Companies work hard to price their goods and services. But how much does the environment pay?
Now the International Organization for Standardization, Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden and others have developed a new system to quantify the monetary impacts of pesticides, air travel, factory smokestacks and other manmade impacts on the environment.
The idea isn't new. But Steen and his colleagues pushed in 2015 to develop a more comprehensive set of standards measure the impacts of products on the environment, cross referencing emissions, for example, with worker productivity and the cost of materials. The standards include price tags for goods on climate change, biodiversity, public health and other factors.
Multinational chemical company Nouryon – formerly Akzo Nobel Specialty Chemicals – is already using the system.