But that wasn't the issue I was discussing.

If you have one factory that is without any air treatment equipment, and one factory where all air are scrubbed, and where the chemical processes is recycling the used chemicals etc, then there will be a huge difference in what improvement you can get for a $1000,000 investment.

The EU environmental policies just looks at local pollution. Sweden should reduce our pollution. Poland it's own. Belgium it's own etc. Sweden have spent a lot of money for quite a number of years, so reducing the pollution with an additional 50% will cost huge amounts of money. The same amount of money, if invested in one of the baltic countries will result in maybe 10 or 100 times better results. Same thing if helping the developing countries - for a poor country, it is more natural to optimize for quantity produced, than environmentally friendly production.

Look at a PC - there isn't so much use to switch to a thicker power coord to the PSU to reduce the losses in the coord. But it's possible to save a lot of power by having a recent motherboard that have similar power-save functions as notebooks, where the clock frequencies and supply voltages are reduced when the machine is idling.

Whenever a process is to be optimized, it's advantageous to look at it from multiple directions, and start with cherry-picking the easy solutions.

In the end, you want bang for buck.

The more factories that is using the same optimization process, the cheaper it will be to implement that process, since one advantage of a massmarket is that the price drops with volume. And a factory that is recycling chemicals may at one point start to make extra money by not having to buy as much chemicals for the production.