Zero Emissions Gathers Force As Global Environmental Concept
Here's a design project: Design a socioeconomic system where the number of smokestacks across a city skyline pouring black smoke into the air equates with progress. Where prosperity is measured by how many materials go through the system. And where productivity is determined by how few people are working.
This is a retroactive design problem as set out at a recent conference in Chattanooga by William A. McDonough, dean of architecture at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville. He posed the problem, which is obviously a spin on the Industrial Revolution, to illustrate the importance of design in any transition to a sustainable socioeconomic system.
And a change to such a system is what the conference was all about. It was the 2nd Annual World Congress on Zero Emissions. An integral but independent part of a larger regional development conference called the Chattanooga Summit, the two-and-a-half-day congress was sponsored by the Zero Emissions Research Initiative (ZERI) of the United Nations University (UNU), which is headquartered in Tokyo.
As the congress amply demonstrated, a grassroots second industrial revolution is in the air and gathering force. It's one that conceptually goes well beyond the idea of pollution control. It's one that sees business as a positive force. It also requires a major paradigm shift, not only in business but in society as a whole.
Edgar S. Woolard, recently retired chief executive officer of DuPont, for example, embodied that spirit at the congress in calling for a step change in the way companies integrate business growth with environmental objectives. Step change is necessary, he told the congress, because society has moved from the idea of pollution prevention to the concept of sustainability, of which pollution prevention is only one component.
Woolard: step change is
necessary"But we cannot continue to do what we have always done, only incrementally better, and expect to achieve sustainability," Woolard said. "If sustainability is to be achieved, we will have to rethink virtually all of our industrial processes. We have to devise new ways to protect the environment, while also building a competitive advantage for business growth."
That idea was echoed at the congress in the comments of Keizo Yamaji, chairman of the board of packaging firm Nihon Tetra Pak, Tokyo, and former president of Canon Inc. "In the manufacturing industry, we should change our management attitude drastically," he said. That, in turn, he added, requires great changes in product planning and business planning, which form the foundation of a manufacturing company's activities.
For economist Curt Nicolin, chairman emeritus of Swiss electrical power technology conglomerate Asea Brown Boveri (ABB) and one who has been called the dean of business in Europe, "The great challenge is to achieve zero emissions and economic growth at the same time."
It is an emphasis on manufacturing and the call for achieving zero emissions even while creating economic growth that differentiates the ZERI approach. As noted by Woolard, the concept extends well beyond more conventional ideas about pollution prevention or about so called end-of-the-pipe treatment technologies.
Moreover, it's a concept that sees business as part of the solution rather than part of the problem. Woolard, in particular, emphasizes that point. It has been DuPont's position for a number of years, he said, that for sustainable development, the only sector that can truly solve environmental problems is industry. In the next quarter century, he emphasized, the most significant net contribution to a greener world will be made by industrial corporations: "Governments can regulate. Environmentalists can agitate. But only industry can innovate."
Zero emissions is a relatively recent concept. Congress delegates were reminded of that by J. Hugh Faulkner, former minister of science of Canada, former secretary general of the International Chamber of Commerce, and currently executive chairman of Sustainable Project Management, a foundation headquartered in Geneva. In noting that the delegates may at times believe not enough is being done fast enough, Faulkner recalled that at the UN Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro four years ago, ZERI didn't exist and zero emissions wasn't even a topic on the agenda.
ZERI came into being two years ago, with Belgian industrialist Gunter Pauli at the helm. A series of organizational activities during its first year helped to shape ZERI's mission, culminating in the 1st World Congress on Zero Emissions, held in Tokyo in April 1995.
As defined by ZERI, zero emissions represents a shift in the concept of industry away from linear models in which wastes are considered the norm to integrated systems in which everything has a use. It envisions an industrial sector where all inputs are used in final products or converted into value-added inputs for other industries or processes. Industry would reorganize into clusters, such that each industry's wastes or by-products are fully matched with the input requirements of others. The integrated whole produces no waste of any kind.
"The time has come," Pauli has said, "for humankind not to expect the Earth to produce more, but rather to do more with what the Earth already produces."
A largely decentralized operation with only a small central-office staff, ZERI in its first year established the latest in computer-networking infrastructure technology to bring it access to the international scientific community. Having now completed its second year, the program has a wide variety of activities under way.
For example, a focus on integrated biosystems has led to the initiation of several small industrial-scale pilot projects in Fiji, Namibia, and Tanzania. Also, research on material separation technologies is being carried out at the Wood Chemistry Institute of the Latvian Academy of Sciences. And, in collaboration with the United Nations Educational, Scientific & Cultural Organization (UNESCO), ZERI is involved in establishing UNESCO/UNU professorship chairs in zero emissions in Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
ZERI has also developed a 20-hour graduate-level course on zero emissions geared toward senior-level participants from diverse backgrounds, including business, government, and education and research. Courses have already been given in Brazil and in Colombia, leading to the founding of a Latin American Zero Emissions Institute. The latter, located in Bogotá, is a collaborative effort of several universities and will focus on training and capacity building. ZERI courses are also slated for Indonesia, Japan, Sweden, and Tanzania.
As the Chattanooga congress made apparent, the zero emissions thrust is rapidly gaining adherents. The congress wasn't big in numbers - not many more than 100 delegates plus an assortment of observers. But drawing participants from some 16 countries, it brought together many movers and shakers from Asia and the Pacific, Europe, Africa, and the Americas.
Indeed, the congress was designed to be more than the usual conference. One of the organizers' goals was for it to help in setting ZERI's course for the year ahead.
Although the physical congress was in Chattanooga, perhaps another few thousand participants attended on the Internet. Advanced communications technology was set up to provide interactive links to participants around the globe by way of their computer terminals. In fact, presentations for the congress from Japan and Sweden were made, with the picture from the Internet link projected on a large screen in Chattanooga. And pre- and postcongress electronic discussion groups employed Internet-based workgroup software made available for downloading by all registered on-site and electronic attendees.
To keep the intellectual footing on firm ground, Alvin W. Trivelpiece, director of the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, reminded the congress in Chattanooga that the three laws of thermodynamics can't be repealed. Nevertheless, he pointed out, "That doesn't mean something can't be done."
As the congress demonstrated, much is being done, whether under the notions of zero emissions or sustainable development or the more general concepts of ecology and environment. Activities range from ZERI's own projects to those of the International Organization for Standardization (ISO), in Geneva, which is developing an ISO 14000 family of standards - something that was referred to more than once during the congress.
ISO 14000 is an emerging set of standards for environmental quality management, with the first edition of the standards expected to be issued soon. For example, a central element of ISO 14001, which specifies environmental management systems, concerns the environmental policy defined by an organization's top management, along with the organization's system to ensure that the environmental policy is carried out. It is thus similar in approach, though not formally related to, the ISO 9000 family of quality management standards. And many observers anticipate that ISO 14000 could have the same impact as the ISO 9000 standards, which are voluntary but which have become de facto requirements for doing business around the world.
In between ZERI projects and ISO deliberations are an array of activities that individual organizations have under way. Not least are those of the chemical industry.
The chemical industry is no newcomer to environmental concerns. What began some years ago as simply pollution control has since become environmental gospel for most of the industry. But like those of other sectors, the attitudes of the chemical industry have been evolving over the years as well.
An indication of the current chemical industry position was provided for the ZERI congress by Isabel Urben, project director of a Top 50 study by the Hamburg Environmental Institute in Germany. The study is designed to evaluate the environmental performance of chemical and pharmaceutical companies, focusing on the largest chemical companies by sales worldwide.
Urben: reactions to study
were mostly positiveThe Hamburg institute carried out its first Top 50 study in 1990, with results from that study published in 1994. Since then, it has been working on the second edition of the study. Those results have just been published (C&EN, May 20, page 30).
A questionnaire consisting of 55 questions on 19 pages, with companies asked to supply additional information for each question, formed the basis for the study. One company's estimate that the amount of work needed for completing the questionnaire was more than 100 working hours indicates that the study clearly called for more than an offhand response. Even so, nearly 50% of all companies that were asked completed the questionnaire, with 80% contributing in some way.
"We think this is a very satisfying number," Urben said. "It shows the commitment of companies." Of significance to the institute, since it is based in Germany, Urben added, is that all the large German chemical companies agreed to complete the questionnaire for the second edition. This, she pointed out, was a large shift in behavior compared with that for the first edition, for which only one German company actually completed the questionnaire.
Reactions to the questionnaire were mostly positive, especially from U.S. companies, Urben said. They told the institute that it helped them to get a real picture of their environmental performance. It helped them to analyze gaps as well as to enforce strengths.
The questionnaire covered a range of topics: environmental policy, worldwide standards, internal management organization, sustainability of projects, process optimization, information policy, practices for handling wastes, environmental accident prevention, contaminated site remediation, and external environmental situations. Added to the company-supplied data was information from independent sources, such as environmental research institutes, industry associations, government agencies, and various experts.
The data were then assembled into an assessment matrix, which gave specific benchmarks for assigning points for each topic, as a way of ensuring consistency in making the assessments. The institute recognized the difficulty in making the assessments comparable, Urben said, since the study was looking at 50 companies with different product slates and different processes.
The average environmental performance of all the companies examined indicates there is still a lot of work to be done, according to Urben. Nevertheless, she added, the ranking clearly shows that all the key chemical producers belong to what the study defines as a proactive group.
For its ranking, the institute divided the companies into four groups - proactive, for those with the highest scores, followed by active, reactive, and passive. A characteristic of the companies in the reactive group, Urben pointed out, is that differences between them are small, such that it is possible to say that a company belongs to the group but the rankings within the group don't have statistical significance. A characteristic of the passive group, she added, is that there are no regional differences, with the group including U.S. companies as well as European and Japanese firms.
Among the general findings from the study, Urben said, is that about one-third of all the companies are operating according to companywide environmental standards. Company standards apply even if production facilities are in a country where local law is less stringent. Also, most of the companies have by now implemented environmental management systems or are in the implementation phase - an area of change from the first study.
Urben also noted that there are large differences between proactive and passive groups. One example of the difference, she said, is calculation of external environmental cost. Passive companies say that, since there is no commonly agreed upon system for doing this, they cannot carry out such a calculation. Proactive companies, on the other hand, realize that although there is no agreed upon system, it is an important issue, and so they generate their own system and do the calculation based upon that.
The relationship of the chemical company with its suppliers is another major difference, Urben said. Unlike the passive companies, proactive companies often have a system according to which they audit their suppliers, since they want to make sure their suppliers work according to the same environmental standards that they themselves do.
Narrowing the focus at the Chattanooga congress from studies of the industry to one individual company, Paul V. Tebo, vice president for safety, health, and environment at DuPont, described his company's approach to zero emissions. DuPont is not alone in the chemical industry in its commitment to eliminating waste and emissions in its processes, but its program is a particularly aggressive one.
Tebo: it's good for
businessNoting that DuPont got started many years ago on eliminating emissions to the air, Tebo told the congress that the company is really getting serious about eliminating waste of any kind. "We're doing this because we believe it's terrifically good for the environment," he said. "But we also realize that every time we eliminate a pound of waste, it most likely will end up in a product." And so, he added, "I bring business concepts into this to convince our business leaders that it's terrifically good to get rid of waste."
Tebo gave examples of four different approaches and what can be accomplished through their application. They include reuse/recycle, coproducts, yield improvement, and zero waste and emissions technology.
An example of recycling is an operation at DuPont that involves old nylon carpet. At its nylon facility in Chattanooga, the company now has a process in place that takes back old nylon carpets, removes the nylon from the backing, then melts the material and puts a mineral filler in it to make mineral-reinforced nylon for automobile parts.
The operation is the basis of a program DuPont has with Ford Motor Co. called carpets-to-cars. DuPont is taking all the nylon carpets out of Ford's world headquarters, bringing them to Chattanooga, and making mineral-reinforced nylon engineering polymers to go into Ford cars.
Tebo pointed out that in recycling, the concept of going down the chain is a bad one. "You need to think of better applications, higher value applications," he said. "Keep the thing in the loop, but keep it moving upward."
For an example of thinking in terms of coproducts, Tebo described a program at DuPont's titanium dioxide plant in New Johnsonville, Tenn. With permission and permits from the Environmental Protection Agency, the plant had for many years injected very dilute aqueous wastes into underground wells. This summer, facilities will start up at New Johnsonville to take all of that stream, neutralize it, and produce three products that will go into food or food-related applications.
One product is high-purity table salt, about 10 times more pure than conventional table salt, Tebo said. The second is something called Iron Rich. The company is still seeking an application for it, but Tebo said it is very good as a fertilizer. The only issue is that there is a lot of it. The third product is carbon dioxide, and DuPont is currently negotiating with a couple of companies to put that into beverages.
Referring to yield improvement, Tebo asked, "Why would you want to run a plant at 80% yield when you could run it at 90% yield. When you go to 90%, you cut your waste in half."
Noting a large DuPont business that has increased yield from mid-70% to almost 95%, he pointed out that the cost of eliminating the waste that used to go to landfill is just a couple of million dollars. But, he said, the business has generated another $100 million per year in additional value to the company because it doesn't have to handle the waste and doesn't have to put it back into the system. Moreover, for every five plants, it can build one less.
An example of a zero-waste product, Tebo said, is the large-volume synthetic rubber neoprene. Just a few years ago, he explained, neoprene was shipped to DuPont customers in paper bags. When the customer got the bag, the operator would don protective equipment, open the bag, dump the neoprene into the compounder, and the bag would go to landfill.
Today, Tebo said, most of the neoprene is shipped in a bag of Surlyn ionomer resin, another DuPont product. The Surlyn bag is lighter than paper, and when the product gets to the plant, the operator does not open the bag but throws bag and all into the compounder. Nothing goes to landfill.
"By the way," Tebo added, "the neoprene productivity in the mixer goes up, so the customer loves it. Our competitors want to license the technology. And we've gotten a new $25 million piece of business, not because of the neoprene but because of the bag."
Tebo's final example was one of zero waste and emissions technology. Last year, the company started up a plant in Surabaya, Indonesia, on the island of Java. It's a small facility making agrochemical products. It was designed from the ground up to have zero waste and emissions, Tebo explained.
At the end of every day, Tebo said, the only thing leaving the plant is the herbicide product, and at the end of the week, maybe a small bag of ash. All process water and the sanitary and laundry waste are treated on-site, with the water eventually evaporated. The air is thoroughly filtered before release, and the solid waste is incinerated on site.
The environmental investment was less than 10% of the total investment, and treatment costs are only a few percent of total operating costs, Tebo added. "While the site is fairly small," he said, "it represents the mind-set we take into new construction today, everywhere in the world, and the type of performance levels we can achieve."
As Tebo makes the rounds of DuPont plants, he posts signs, similar to bumper stickers, setting out the company's emissions policy: "The Goal is '0.' " The sign comes in various languages for different plant locations. "I think you have to have something like 'zero,' " Tebo tells C&EN. "I don't think you can give people the room to negotiate. You can't say 'almost zero.' That takes all the teeth out of it.
"My objective," Tebo adds, "is to get 105,000 people in DuPont all having not just safety and health but environment as an integral part of everything they do every day. I think that's absolutely essential."
Tebo's experience with the chemical industry, he says, is in agreement with a fairly recent report finding that about 60% of the firms studied still look on a company's environmental response as being about meeting laws and regulations. He finds another 20 or 30% of companies that have started to work aggressively on pollution prevention, doing things that are out ahead of laws and regulations.
"Then there's another 10 or 15%, which we're trying very much to be a part of," Tebo says. "We're saying the reason we're making all these changes is not just that it's good for the environment, it's good for business."
Consumers and customers should be the driving force behind the effort, Tebo believes. From the standpoint of the market-based system, he says, "You can't go to the consumer and say, 'Look, you need to pay another dime because this is so good for the environment.' People just don't do that."
What's needed, Tebo says, is to say, "This is terrifically good for the environment. By the way, the quality is 'no defects.' And by the way, it's a nickel cheaper." That can't be done, he maintains, without getting rid of waste.
Tebo thinks that for a company to institute a program of zero emissions, it should link the program to something that it already knows works. Some companies might place a value on quality. Others might place a value on productivity. "I think if you link it into something you know, it gets it out of the dream category," Tebo says. "It gets it into something that people can believe can be done."
For DuPont, the core value was safety. When the company was founded, Tebo says, the founding fathers made the simple statement that all injuries and illnesses can be prevented. The company isn't at zero on injuries and illnesses, he says, but in 1995, with 105,000 employees, operating in 17 countries around the world, with 200 manufacturing plants, Du Pont had fewer than 40 people lose a day due to an injury. Major transportation incidents have essentially been eliminated. And in 1995, there were no major process fires or explosions. Not only did no one get hurt, Tebo says, but compared with an average performance, last year's achievement saved the corporation $100 million.
At the end of the day, as Tebo puts it, people say, "What does all this really mean? Tell me. These are just stories." Tebo's answer is that in 1995, DuPont had record earnings, record sales, and the highest shareholder value in the history of the company. It also had the safest year in the history of the company. And it had the lowest wastes and emissions since it had begun measuring. Moreover, he adds, 1996 is going to be better on all those fronts.
"So I'm convinced," Tebo says, "that if you come at this from a business approach, everything gets better."
University of Virginia architect McDonough looks at sustainability as a designer. He views design itself, he explained to the congress, as an example of human intentions. It's a front-of-the-pipe approach, so to speak, as opposed to applying end-of-the-pipe technology.
This point of view leads McDonough to a way of approaching design of products with sustainability in mind, he told the congress. The basic precept is that the world is made of two metabolisms: a biological metabolism and a technological metabolism. There should not be an output from one into the other.
With this approach providing a philosophical underpinning, McDonough set out to see what happens to design when a "no pipes" concept is applied. Choosing textiles as the example, he surveyed the use of chemicals for dyes and treatments and found that of the hundreds in use only a small handful were not toxic or otherwise environmentally harmful. After settling on an approach, he went to 70 chemical companies in Europe seeking a development partner. The response, as he told the congress, was not great, but Ciba-Geigy in Switzerland did agree to work with him.
One problem of designing with the small number of environmentally appropriate chemicals, McDonough said, is that of color. So far, he told the congress - evoking Henry Ford's comment about the Model T that one could have any color as long as it was black - one can have any color of textile as long as it isn't black. "We're working on black," he said.
The result, though, is dramatic. When the inspectors came to the plant to examine the effluent following the first dye run, McDonough recalled, they thought their instruments weren't working. And Ciba started recycling the water from the operation.
The moral for McDonough and the implications of the design approach for end-of-the-pipe treatment technology: "When an industry would rather use its effluent water than Swiss drinking water, you can cap the pipe."
For zero-emissions adherents, such evangelistic fervor never seems far below the surface. It certainly underlies the actions that earned ZERI's 1996 Unique Leadership Award for Sarwono Kusumaatmadja, minister of state for environment in Indonesia and chairman of the UN Biodiversity Convention.
Last December, Sarwono issued a decree classifying the environmental performance of companies, using a color-coding system. Black is for companies facing forced closure, red for highly polluting companies, orange for companies not meeting legal standards, green for companies exceeding all legal norms, and gold for zero-emissions companies. In a deft political maneuver, Sarwono issued the decree during a long holiday lull so that it would be firmly in place before much resistance to it could develop.
The award cited Sarwono for "an act of leadership and a proof of vision." The citation noted that, "While regulations would never be able to force companies to reach the zero standard, this decree will motivate many to go for the honor. As we learned, corporations are already striving for the gold/zero-emissions standards in a way no regulatory measure could ever have achieved."
In inviting ZERI to hold the 3rd Annual World Congress in Indonesia, Sarwono noted that the six green companies are anxious to know how to get a gold rating. Others, he said, would like to bypass the ratings system and come out on top immediately.
Even as the concept of zero emissions for manufacturing is just beginning to take hold, DuPont's Woolard, the 1995 ZERI award recipient, has already raised the stakes. Zero emissions is one essential step change on the way to sustainable communities, he told the congress. Another pressing issue is land use.
In many countries of the world, Woolard pointed out, greenfields continue to be used for industrial development, while abandoned areas, brownfields, sit unutilized. There are many reasons for this situation, he pointed out, which in the U.S. include government policy, liability laws, and other concerns. Nevertheless, he added, continued development of greenfield sites should not be viewed as a sustainable practice.
"I can imagine the skepticism at which such a proposal will be greeted," Woolard said, "but I propose that UNU or other appropriate organizations begin to contemplate a goal of zero greenfield development and consider creating an initiative to pursue that goal. ... At the heart of any vision of sustainable communities must be the preservation of green space."
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