Environmental pollution of all types creates problems throughout the world. So in recent years the concept of 'clean technologies' , which do not produce contaminants and involve energy-efficient processes, has developed.
Cleaner Production (CP) is the international term for reducing environmental impacts from processes, products and services by using better management strategies, methods and tools. (CP is called Pollution Prevention (P2) in North America, and Produccion Mas Limpia (PL) in Latin America.
Related terms include green business, sustainable business, eco-efficiency, and waste minimization.
P2 focuses on process and product improvements in order to avoid environmental problems before they occur. It is economically and environmentally superior to traditional "end-of-pipe" controls or clean-up strategies.
In the US, P2 is defined by the Pollution Prevention Act of 1990 as "the use or modification of processes or practices that reduce or eliminate the creation of pollutants or wastes at the source and, when pollutants or wastes can not be prevented, utilizing environmentally sound in-process or closed-loop recycling."
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How best to encourage the adoption of P2?
In Canada, for, instance, the federal government through Environment Canada runs The National Office of Pollution Prevention (NOPP). This is charged with the implementation of federal pollution prevention policy and legislation, and the development of new concepts and policy instruments that facilitate the transition to pollution prevention in Canada.
In Sarnia, Ontario-just up-river from Detroit-the Canadian Centre for Pollution Prevention "encourages actions that avoid or minimize the creation of pollutants and waste, to foster a healthier environment and sustainable society."
Environmental Management Systems
The best way of implementing P2 is, systematically, thoughout the organization concerned. An Environmental Management System, EMS, is one good approach to this. An overall system such as this helps organizations, especially businesses, manage their environmental performance. Formal management disciplines such as the ISO 14001 standard for EMS's are being more and more used: in Chile, for instance, a FUNDES spokesperson recently called for its rapid application.
Other forms of assessment such as INEM (the International Network for Environmental Management), for example, has a Sustainability Reporting Guide, based on GRI (Global Reporting Initiative) guidelines.
The GRI is developing a globally applicable framework which reports on an organisation's sustainability performance, the economic, environmental and social dimensions of their activities, products and services. (Started in 1997 by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES), the GRI became independent in 2002, and is an official collaborating centre of the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and works in co-operation with UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan's Global Compact.)
GRI's s strength in part comes from its multi-stakeholder approach. Organized labour for instance, became involved with the GRI "because we realise that the GRI Guidelines are becoming a de-facto industry standard in terms of non-financial reporting, " John Evans of the Trade Union Advisory Committee to the OECD said in August 2003. Another labour leader, Guy Ryder, General Secretary, International Confederation of Free Trade Unions, hailed the GRI because it "has the potential to increase the transparency and accountability needed to build sustainable societies. The inclusion of labour as an independent stakeholder in this initiative will be an essential component of its success."
Environmental accounting
"There are at least several thousand organizations around the world focused exclusively on CP and P2. " So says Burton Hamner, author of the CD-Rom, "Greatest Hits Collection for Cleaner Production and Pollution Prevention."
There's also if not quite as many, quite a range of systems not just of assessment, but also of accountancy, competing with each other to integrate and provide the fullest, most satisfying yet most consistent and generally applicable and acceptable, means of assessing environmental impacts.
There is, for example, a journal, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, which "provides a forum for the growing number of accounting researchers and practitioners who realize that conventional theory and practice is ill-suited to the challenges of the modern environment, and that accounting practices and corporate behavior are inextricably connected with many allocative, distributive, social, and ecological problems of our era."
Environmental Accounting is a broad term that is used in several different contexts, such as management accounting, financial accounting, and national accounting. As Burton Hamner says, "Environmental Management Accounting is a foundation of CP and P2. It provides the data needed to identify cost-effective opportunities for improvement. "
The application of Environmental Accounting for internal organizational decisions, i.e., Environmental Management Accounting (EMA) is encouraged, and overseen by EMARIC, the Environmental Management Accounting Research & Information Center, but other initiatives come from, for example, Canada's federal government, via Environment Canada in cooperation with the Ordre des comptables agréés du Québec:
Available in French and English, their guide to EMA is aimed at "all environmental professionals : biologists, engineers, chemists, accountants or lawyers in order to improve the management of environmental issues faced by companies. "
This guide calculates the impact of pollution prevention activities, and gives examples of Canadian firms showing various aspects of environmental accounting, and environmental management, and provides an assessment grid to analyse a firm's environmental balance sheet.
EMA can be defined as the identification, collection, estimation, analysis, internal reporting, and use of materials and energy flow information, environmental cost information, and other cost information for both conventional and environmental decision-making within an organization.
EMA developed because relevant and significant environmental costs were simply not being considered at all in the accounting records. EMA's practitioners hope that, in the end, the distinction between conventional management accounting and EMA may blur, as the two approaches merge into a single broad management accounting approach that can better inform all decisions, environmental and otherwise.
Other ways of bringing about p2: e.g. Water and Energy, Design, and Small Business
EMA's potential benefits include not just the cost-effective reduction of pollutant emissions, but it also enables the more efficient and cost-effective use of natural resources, including energy and water. Yet EMA does not include external costs to individuals, society, or the environment for which a company is not legally held responsible. The main problem of EMA, an article in the Journal of Cleaner Production, Sep 2003 says, is that "we lack a standard definition of environmental costs."
So other ways have to be considered. P2 also includes practices that increase efficiency in the use of energy, water, or other natural resources through conservation. Small businesses can generate significant energy and cost savings by pursuing energy efficiency and water conservation--many actions to improve energy efficiency reduce greenhouse gas emissions, smog and other air pollutants.
Programmes such as that of the OAS indicated below include methods for reducing energy and water use. Energy and water efficiency programmes identify opportunities to save money, and renewable energy sources are investigated and promoted .
Design for Environment
It is estimated that $1 spent on prevention saves $10 otherwise spent at end-of-pipe or $100 expended on environmental remediation. For long-term sustainability and environmental protection the design of products and processes must improve.
One of the basic assumptions underlying Sustainable Development is that environmental considerations must be entrenched in economic decision-making. Design for the environment , DfE, is part and parcel of sustainable development, and also of P2. The website, Pollution Prevention by Design, describes itself thus: "An integrated set of tools to help engineers, designers, and planners incorporate pollution prevention (P2) strategies into the design stage of new products, processes, and facilities.
Design for Environment (DfE) is the systematic consideration during design of issues associated with environmental safety and health over the entire product life cycle. DfE can be thought of as the migration of traditional pollution prevention concepts upstream into the development phase of products before production and use."
SMEs
The OAS's Inter-American Program for Environment Technology Cooperation in Key Industry Sectors, for instance, sets out to prevent and reduce pollution, and assist in the evaluation of clean products and technologies: "Support of small and medium enterprises is of high priority in the Western Hemisphere. Such industries make sizeable contributions to the gross national product; they have the highest employment rate; they encourage the transition from the artisan to entrepreneur, they offer opportunities to youth and income to needy social strata; and they also present a very large share of paid employment for women. "
Canada's aid research centre, the IDRC, through its Montevideo office promotes P2 by, for example, assisting in the OAS programme s mentioned above. These address, for instance, the challenges faced by small and medium-size enterprises-with projects focusing on such sectors as the textile and leather industriers, agri-food, metal- plating, energy- efficiency, municipal water, solid waste management and forestry. These and other sectors find out how to adopt cost-effective, environmentally sound technologies and management practices.
Other means of furthering P2 include green purchasing, and local procurement. Within Europe, for instance, in programmes involving Ireland, UK, Hungary, Germany and Spain, the European Union encourages companies and public authorities to favour local procurement, and to exchange experiences and to combine their purchasing power in favour of 'greener' products and services, as part of environmental management system to achieve and report on continual improvement at organisational, institutional, national and international levels.
In South America, progress is being made using public purchasing power as a tool for changing production patterns. Purchasing decisions, to select products or services with less environmental impact, are analysed. Speaking at a UN Sustainable Development conference in Morocco in June 2003, , Laura Ceneviva, Department of Environmental Planning of the City of São Paulo, Brazil, spoke about. highlighted how the municipality of São Paulo is changing its pattern of production towards sustainable development and outlined her department’s experience at the local level.
São Paulo, she said, is shifting from being a production-oriented to a service-oriented city. Ceneviva highlighted the problems that Brazil faced with decreasing energy supply and described how consumers in all sectors responded by reducing their energy consumption by 10% in a short time period. Noting that the poor in São Paulo play a crucial role in recycling paper and cans, she stressed that waste management policies must recognize their interests. She highlighted the difficulties in managing a city where individuals have very different levels of income and literacy.
In 1987, the World Commission on Environment and Development defined Sustainable Development as: "...development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs." P2 is clearly an important contribution towards that end.
*Dr. Alexander Craig is a writer based in Quebec. Formerly Buenos Aires correspondent for the Guardian and other British papers, he then wrote his Ph.D., at Manchester, on the politics of development.
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