With this object in mind, an international conference on ecodesign was held in February last year, where the Manifesto of Ecodesign was announced. I was the one who put together the draft for this, actually, but we announced an English-language version of the Manifesto of Ecodesign, stating that we will carry out design and production with the environment in mind. A variety of methods have been developed within ecodesign. Another is Product Assessment. The MIPS Minimization Method developed in Germany is a way of minimizing the amount of natural resources used per unit of service.
Forecasting is a way of saying what is going happen in the future.
By the same token, back-casting is a method in which the conditions are set that a sustainable society should fulfill, and then those conditions are applied to current management and products, all the problems found are listed, and then everybody discusses how to solve those problems within a certain span of time. The fifth method takes a macro approach and, instead of looking at micro design and production, tries to replace all waste with valuable products by building industrial clusters in Japan to reach zero emissions. Product improvement is mostly Factor Two. Double resource productivity or environmental efficiency. Product redesign is Factor Five, product concept innovation is Factor Ten, and system innovation is Factor Twenty.