Knowledge and science

Exnovation

Better a fresh horse ...

Handlooms, leaded fuel, cassette recorders, incandescent lightbulbs – a glance back at the last 100 years of industrial history shows that out-of-date technologies have been replaced by new ones time and time again. Today, we call this “exnovation”, but it is not a new phenomenon: industrial societies have always evolved in this way,... more

Final storage

Starter’s orders for final storage

In July 2016, the German Commission on the Storage of High-Level Radioactive Waste presented its final report. I myself was a member of the Commission, which spent a total of two years working to define a procedure for the selection of a final storage site for Germany’s nuclear waste. In summer 2016, the new Federal Office for the... more

Everything under control?

Robust but proportionate regulation

More than three decades have passed since the publication of Chemie im Haushalt, Rainer Griesshammer’s guide to chemicals in the home. It became an instant non-fiction bestseller. Compared with the 1980s and the time before that, we now live in a world with far fewer unregulated hazardous chemicals in the home and – more importantly,... more

40 years of the Oeko-Institut

more

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