Cradle to Grave

The entire life cycle of something from its birth (cradle) to death (grave).

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  Direct Maintenance Costs

An Economic Sustainability Indicator. • Brief Description: This identifies all the costs that can be directly allocated to a service: it excludes support costs that are centralised, and which would be apportioned out amongst a range of services. • Relevance to sustainability: Maintenance costs must be affordable and realistic if a service is to be maintained on a regular and continuous basis. If the direct costs being considered are only those costs for which a manager or organisation has control over, then any other direct costs would need to be identified as a separate sub-cate

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  Disposal

A stage in the waste hierarchy means any material which cannot be recovered; it is therefore disposed of, typically to a land-fill site.

  Diversity of Use

A Social Sustainability Indicator. • Brief Description: This is an aggregated qualitative measure of the range of ages, genders, ethnicity, affluence, experiences (new users / regular users) etc. of the range of users.

  DPSIR

Acronym for the Driver, Pressure, State, Impact and Response framework which identifies the causal links between each feature and for developing indicators to enable consequential social and environmental relationships to be better understood, with improved decision making, from an environmental problem. Drivers are economic and social factors that drive human activities such as lifestyle, production, consumption, as well as leisure and sporting activities. These apply pressure to, or release pressure from, the environment. The resultant pressures will depend on the relationship between th

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  Eco-efficiency

Increasing productivity, with more value, whilst using fewer resources and reducing environmental impacts such as waste and pollution, and also reducing unit costs. Eco-efficiency is a ratio of economic output and environmental impact and involves the use of life cycle assessment. It is a sustainability measure of economic and environmental, but not social, factors.

  Ecological Carrying Capacity

The maximum population size of species that an environment can sustain indefinitely, without causing deterioration to the environment, given the available resources (such as food, habitat, light levels, water) within that environment. Sometimes an additional qualifier is given which adds "during the harshest or most challenging part of a year". However, inclusion of the word "part" is quite subjective in that it doesn't provide an indication of the length of the period, for example, is it a week, month or season? See also Carrying Capacity.

  Ecological Footprint

1. An accounting tool that measures the biologically productive area needed to sustain the resource consumption and waste assimilation of a community, process or service. 2. An Environmental Sustainability Indicator. • Brief Description: This is the area required to support the service being provided. It is a measure of how much natural area is needed to produce all the resources that are consumed and to incorporate all the waste produced in the processes that are undertaken in providing a service.

  Ecological Rucksack

The total quantity of resources needed to produce a finished product. This can be used to measure the eco-efficiency (called the Rucksack factor in this context) of the manufacturing and production process, as well as indicating the resources pressures exerted on the environment. It is calculated by determining the weight of the finished product and subtracting this from the total material inputs (most of which ends up as waste pollution) needed to create the product, being expressed as ER = MI ¯ PW (or net weight) [ER = Ecological Rucksack; MI = Material Inputs; PW = Product Weight].

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  Economic Carrying Capacity

The level of use of a site or surface that is required to yield a minimum required financial return so as to ensure it is financially viable in sustaining the site or surface.