Brief Introduction to Cleaner Production
Cleaner Production is the concept of improving the quality of 'doing things' from a sustainability point of view. Cleaner Production came about when industries started to realize that by producing tons of (liquid, solid, gaseous) waste they did not only pollute the/-ir environment (which gradually became more expensive for clean-up reasons), they also wasted resources which could have been used for the generation of products and, thus, for the making of profit.
Cleaner Production then started looking at better - less wasteful - industrial production processes, the use of less toxic raw materials, more effective reuse, recycling and recovery processes, etc. Over the decades the scope of Cleaner Production has expanded beyond just industrial processes and now include many sustainability-based theories and concepts.