Feebate

Any system that taxes socially undesirable activities and products and uses the money to support more desirable ones. For example, transportation taxes for gasoline or tolls often support public transportation that has less environmental impact and eases traffic congestion.  Read More

Externalities

Externalities are effects of services, products, or production on third parties who were not involved in the buyer/seller relationship. Externalities occur when a third party incurs unintended consequences from the market behaviors of others. Externalities can be either negative (pollution, waste clean-up fees that a community must bear, rather than the generator of the waste), or they can be positive (The Clean Water Act generates positive effects... Read More

Equator Principles

Developed in 2002 by a group of banks, these guidelines are a framework for addressing environmental and social risks in project financing. The purpose of the principles is to screen projects for adverse environmental or human affects in order to safeguard communities and natural habitats. Financial institutions who sign-on to the principles agree not to finance projects that fail to meet these screens. These principles classify projects into three... Read More

Environmental Risk Assessment (ERA)

A method of tracking and rating the risks associated with a product and the emissions associated with its manufacturing.  Read More

Entrepreneur

A person who assumes a lot of personal, financial, or business risk to pursue a market opportunity that does not yet exist.  Read More

Emissions Trading

An approach used by governmental regulatory agencies, private trading systems (such as the CCX), and private companies to reduce air pollution by providing economic incentives to reduce net emissions. Limits or “caps” are set and groups that foresee exceeding these caps may purchase credits from groups that have not the exceeded their emissions levels.  Read More

Ecotistical

A term coined by David Crawford of the Manitoba Product Stewardship Corporation, writing in GreenBiz.com referring to: Characteristic of those having inflated the truthfulness about their own environmental accomplishments Characteristic of having an exaggerated sense of environmental importance An environmental disregard of others  Read More

Ecosystem

A dynamic and interdependent living communityof people, parts, or mechanisms that interact with one another. The term was coined by Arthur Tansley, a British Ecologist, who said that ecosystems have the capacity to respond to change without altering the basic characteristics of the system. A business can be viewed as an ecosystem, as can a market, industry, or economy.  Read More

Eco-Labels

An environmental label or declaration that provides information about a product or service in terms of its overall environmental character, a specific environmental aspect or number of environmental aspects. The information can be used to influence or inform purchasing decisions. Eco-labels may take the form of a statement, symbol, or graphic and be found, in part, on products or packaging and in product literature or advertising. Eco-labels... Read More

Eco-efficiency

A term for leveraging technological and process changes in order to generate solutions that offer more value than current offerings while reducing resource use and environmental impact throughout the product or service’s life. Ideally, eco-efficiency not only achieves the best possible efficiency in terms of materials and energy used in the creation, use, and disposal of a product or service, but it might leave residual value equal to or higher... Read More