Parts of the Composite Environmental Impact Index

The Composite Environmental Impact Index (CEII) is composed of three parts: the Depletion index (DI), the Entropy index (EI) and the Pollution index (PI).

Depletion index (DI) measures how much of natural resources is removed (but not returned in natural state) from the environment. Resources are of various kinds: minerals, water, land, habitat, animals, plant species, etc., and they can be removed in various stages of the product lifetime: production, usage or disposal.

Entropy index (EI) measures the energy that is released during the lifetime of a product, and is dissipated into the atmosphere.

Finally, the Pollution index (PI) measures the introduction of substances back into foreign environment. The foreign requirement is important, as, for example, putting the ocean water back into the ocean does not matter, while putting mercury into the ocean does.

Click on a particular index to learn how it is computed.

The three parts are combined as a weighted sum to produce the composite index:

Constants a, b and c are the relative importance of the component indices. Right now, we assign the following values to them:
a = 0.009
b = 0.001
c = 0.99

These values were chosen to reflect our conviction that the pollution is the most important environmental threat, followed by the depletion of resources. The entropy (energy dissipated) has no known impact, but it seems that we should not neglect it completely.