ABSTRACT
The ADEME (the French Agency for Environment and Energy Conservation) is the French environmental regulator, but it is also a research and analysis organisation. It is thus possible to measure France’s progress on the integration of environmental considerations into industrial practices by looking at what the ADEME is promoting. Why is it that in 1999 the ADEME is just getting around to advancing the idea of eco-conception, when life-cycle thinking has been around for over a decade and surged early in the 1990s? Why is the agency just now moving to introduce such thinking into the national industrial fabric?
