Workshop: Environmental Monitoring

The project ‘Switzerland’s sustainability footprint’ shows that greenhouse gas emissions associated with the global supply chains of Switzerland are among the largest in the world.

Furthermore, sustainable policies need to rely on comprehensive, aggregated and periodically updated data from Switzerland’s global supply chains. However, in existing databases these data are either incomplete or not available in sufficient quality in existing databases. The objective of the project ‘Open assessment of the Swiss economy and society’ aims to reduce this gap and improve data uncertainties.

In order to calculate the environmental value preserved in a product through reuse, reprocessing or recycling, the project ‘Towards a circular economy’ developed the ‘Retained Environmental Value’ (REV) indicator.

During the workshop, the discussion focused on the risks and sustainability impact of global supply chains as well as on how to measure the value retained in the circular economy. The key recommendations from the workshop are to impose higher resource taxes as well as incentives encouraging a sustainable circular economy. Participants recommend an REV for dummies or a catalogue listing the retained environmental value for different products or materials.

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