40 years of the Oeko-Institut

40 years of the Oeko-Institut

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Noise

Loud, louder, noise

If like me you live in Hessen, and close to Frankfurt Airport at that, you are bound to be familiar with the subject of noise. But it is not only near airports that people are being subjected to ever-increasing noise pollution. Many of us are finding that traffic noise, the sound of construction work or the noise of loud machinery... more

Back to the beginning

Standards and rules

“Back to the beginning” is often the motto in our projects when we analyse the environmental impacts of products, processes or services. There are already numerous schemes that attempt to bolster the importance of fairness and environmental performance in the production chain. Sometimes it is individual companies who get things... more

Raw materials

From Pliny to the present day – the strategic use of raw materials

In the little free time that I have, I like to read the old scholars and historians – Pliny, for example. My summer reading was his Natural History, which is a collection of ancient knowledge of the natural sciences. In one section of his work, Pliny writes about metals and ores and their importance in the ancient world. Even back... more

Obsolescence

Urban myths and academic analysis

My first TV was a hand-me-down, acquired when I was a student in the 1970s. It was a 25-year-old black and white set and it could only pick up Channel 1 at first. To access the new programmes when ZDF began broadcasting in 1961, you had to buy a UHF converter. In those days, electrical appliances remained in use for a long time, new... more

A roundabout, not a one-way street

A better world tomorrow?

617 kilos: that’s the average amount of waste generated by every German every year. That means that at my age, I have produced more than 38 tonnes of waste in my lifetime – perhaps slightly less, assuming that we lived in a less wasteful society in the past. As children, we learned what could be thrown away and what was to be used... more

Green Economy

We need real progress!

The Green Economy? To me, it feels as it has never been off the Oeko-Institut’s agenda. We were talking about it back in 1985, when we published our second study on energy system transformation, focusing on energy services and the future role of the municipal utilities as key actors in this process. We were talking about it in 1996,... more

The half-way stage in Germany’s “energy turnaround”

The energy turnaround: half-time, complete success?

With the publication of the book Energiewende – Wachstum und Wohlstand ohne Erdöl und Uran in 1980, the Oeko-Institut presented, for the first time, comprehensive scenarios for an alternative energy future. Florentin Krause, Hartmut Bossel and Karl-Friedrich Müller-Reissmann described how growth can be decoupled from the consumption... more