Bilbao Ecodesign Meeting 2014

The Basque Ecodesign Meeting 2014, the largest Ecodesign event in Southern Europe, was held in the Bilbao Euskalduna Conference Centre on 17 November, and was attended by the Basque Government’s Minister for the Environment and Territorial Policy, Ana Oregi, and over 300 leading companies and professionals in industrial ecodesign.

During the event, jointly organised by the Basque Government's Ministry for the Environment and Territorial Policy, through Ihobe, and the Basque Ecodesign Center, there were over 80 speakers, including Michele Galatola from the European Commission's Directorate General for the Environment.

As Oregi explained, “the current infrastructures, business models and technology, along with consumer habits, are keeping the economy stuck in a “use and throw away” linear model. The transformation towards a new green economy will slow down if we do not get the policies to focus more on action and not so much on statements of good intentions”.

As a viable solution to bring the change about, Oregi proposed “implementing more sustainable consumption and production practices beyond the traditional approach, limited to the production centre, and using the life cycle concept, or in other words, taking into account the social, economic and environmental impacts of the product from the extraction and processing of the raw materials, then the manufacturing, distribution, use, maintenance and repairing, to recycling and ?nal elimination”.

Other vanguard regions of Europe which are also committed to Ecodesign, such as Catalonia, North Rhine-Westphalia (Germany) and Flanders (Belgium), also took part in the event. Cristina Oyón, on behalf of the Basque Industrial Development Agency (SPRI), explained how Ecodesign is part of the recently approved smart specialisation strategy of the Basque Country.

The event was also an opportunity to show how environmental criteria can be integrated in practices in this type of events, by means of signing up to the “Erronka Garbia" initiative aimed at fostering the integration of environmental criteria in event organisation.

Moment during the plenary session of the Basque Ecodesign Meeting 2014 in Bilbao on 17 November

Structure of the congress

This year’s event was structured into eight parallel sessions, according to a dual classi?cation: 5 thematic sessions and 3 sectoral sessions.

The THEMATIC SESSIONS considered di?erent technical aspects of interest for companies and of cross-cutting application to all industrial sectors. These sessions were:

• Session 1. New integrated Methodologies for Ecodesign: From Life Cycle Costing to Life Cycle Sustainability Assessment.
• Session 2. The Company and Ecosystemic Services: Tools, Future Prospects and Opportunities.
• Session 3. The Role of SMEs in Ecodesign: Drivers or Driven?
• Session 4. End-of-life and integrated management systems: Opportunity for or Threat to Ecodesign?
• Session 5: Marketing and Ecodesign: How to Provide the Consumer with Accurate Environmental Information. Market instruments.

The SECTORAL SESSIONS, in a similar way to previous years, seek to analyse the implications that Ecodesign represents for a speci?c sector. There were three sectoral sessions this year:

• Session 6: Ecodesign Applied to the Mobility Sector: Eco-innovation Applied to Means of Transport.
• Session 7: Eco-innovation in the Food Sector: Integrating Sustainability in the Value Chain.
• Session 8. HABIC Sustainability Meeting – Basque Hospitality, Wood & Design Cluster.

Each one of the parallel work sessions was hosted by one of more of the partner industrial companies of the Basque Ecodesign Center.

Partner entities

The Bilbao Ecodesign Meeting 2014 joined forces with numerous entities both from the Basque Country and abroad.

Special mention should be made of the support of the European Commission, and of the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Food and the Environment, through the Biodiversidad Foundation, and of the Autonomous Government of Catalonia.

In turn, universities, technology centres and sectoral clusters of the Basque Country helped to ensure the success of the congress and actively participated both in showcasing the contents and disseminating the results of the discussions.

Speech by Michele Galatola, from the European Commission

Basque Ecodesign Meeting 2014ren erakunde kolaboratzaileak

Full information on the BEM 2014 available online:

A speci?c website has been set up to access all the information on the Basque Ecodesign Meeting 2014, including access to all the papers and to the publications that were presented during the event. Link to the website: http://bem2014.basqueecodesigncenter.net/.

This content is also available through the Basque Ecodesign Center website (http:// www.basqueecodesigncenter.net), and includes the visual material and the di?erent messages received through Twitter using the event's hashtag: #ecodesignBEM2014.