Factor 10
The goal of being ten times as productive with half the resources (materials and energy), leading to a factor 10 improvement in efficiency. Alternatively, practices that are just as productive while using only 10% of the resources also qualify.
This is an escalated challenge from the concept introduced in the 1998 book, Factor 4, written by L. Hunter Lovins and Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, and Ernst von Weizsäcker, founder of the Wuppertal Institute for Climate, Environment & Energy. The book explains how relatively easy it is for businesses to achieve Factor 4 results (four times the efficiency of materials and energy use) with existing technologies. It has many examples of real-world projects that save money and reduce pollution simultaneously.
You haven’t got the arithmetic quite right. Factor X relates to eco-efficiency (doing more with less) as originally defined by the World Business Council for Sustainable Development. Factor 4 is doubling the output while halving the impact, or quadrupling the output for the same impact, or producing the same amount for for 25% of the impact. Factor 10 ranges from 10 times the output for the same impact to the same impact for 10% of the impact.
some errors here: factor 4 originally meant: to double the living standards while halving ressource consumption. 2 * 2 = 4.
Factor ten meant doubling living standards while cutting ressource use by 80 %, which means 2 * 5 = 10.
Dig?
Now, in some areas, much bigger factors are of course possible, as with the new PowerPC processors from IBM which only take 0,5 Watt. But an average of factor 10 would be quite o.k. and an incredible boost to both economy and ecology – doing much more with much less.