For those who might be interested, there is an interesting article on
pollution prevention at
http://www.nrdc.org/nrdc/nrdcpro/msri/msriinx.html

Here are some excerpts:

"Preventing Industrial Pollution at its Source
A Final Report of the Michigan Source Reduction Initiative


EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

     "Hey, there is a $100 bill on the floor over there!"
     "That can't possibly be a real $100 bill. If it were, some one
would have already picked it up."

Most environmental policy makers and business leaders believe that
opportunities to reduce pollution while at the same time save money
would be implemented without hesitation if such opportunities were ever
discovered. The fact that such opportunities are seldom trumpeted leads
to the belief that they must be very rare. Therefore, many people
subscribe to the "dollar bills on the floor" theory, which holds that if
such opportunities really existed, they would have already been seized.

This project, the Michigan Source Reduction Initiative (MSRI), shows
that this widely-held impression is wrong. Over only a two-year time
frame, the project found opportunities to reduce nearly 7 million pounds
of wastes and emissions at the Dow
Chemical manufacturing site in Midland, Michigan while saving the
company over five million dollars annually. In the course of this
project, Dow businesses committed capital to these projects, and the
reductions and savings have already largely taken place.

Perhaps more incredibly, by the reckoning of Dow managers, the
reductions and cost savings identified and approved in this project
would not have occurred without the unique involvement of a group of
outside environmental activists. Thus, this success defies a second
piece of conventional wisdom, which holds that only company experts
themselves accomplish pollution prevention successfully. To the
contrary, the MSRI experience shows that companies can benefit
substantially from interaction with informed critics drawn from the
community and regional and national environmental organizations. ...

MSRI ACHIEVEMENTS

The MSRI project exceeded its aggressive 35% reduction goals. It reduced
targeted emissions by 43%, from 1 million to 593,000 pounds and targeted
wastes by 37%, from 17.5 million to 11 million pounds. Some chemical
wastes and releases, such as formaldehyde, were nearly completely
eliminated. This accomplishment gives credence to the conclusion that
MSRI provided both new incentives and new techniques to achieve
pollution reductions that Dow had not seriously considered previously in
its routine business and  environmental operations. In addition to the
total quantities of reductions achieved, the
types of waste reductions are particularly significant, because
approximately two-thirds of the wastes reduced-4 million pounds-were
chlorinated.

The cost savings and process improvements that MSRI delivered were
similarly significant. The reductions will be paid for in less than one
year. This translates to an overall rate of return of 180%. The rate of
return for some individual projects was spectacular. One project, for
example, required $330,000 and will return $3,300,000 per year in raw
material savings and lowered production costs alone. Eight other
projects paid for themselves in three to 12 months. All but one of the
projects easily met business hurdle rates, the amount of profitability
required to be achieved by a project for a business to invest in it, and
the project that was an exception was undertaken for other reasons by
the plant.

A total of 17 projects delivered these reductions. The details of these
projects reveal important insights into pollution prevention:

     First, the vast majority of MSRI projects required relatively small
amounts of capital. These small projects face fewer obstacles than large
projects when competing for capital within a firm. For example, most Dow
businesses have small capital project funds that will allow projects
costing less than approximately $300,000 to go forward with an
abbreviated business capital approval process. Thirteen of the seventeen
projects fell below this cut-off point.

     Second, some of the MSRI projects reducing the greatest quantities
of wastes/emissions cost the least amount of money. There was no
consistent correlation between amount of money required and pounds
reduced.

     Third, opportunities were broadly available in the various
businesses in the plant. They did not confine themselves to either "new"
or "old" production processes or a particular type of manufacturing.
Good reduction opportunities were found in almost every production
process.

     Fourth, several projects focused on basic process changes and yet
were designed and implemented in a relatively short time frame.

     Fifth, confidentiality agreements between activists and Dow were
not necessary; it was possible to explain both processes and engineering
opportunities for reductions with an amount of detail that supported
informed conversations about opportunities without disclosing any
business-sensitive information.

     Sixth, the most readily identified and adopted strategies were
those that involved making process changes or internally recycling
solvents. No business achieved its MSRI reductions by reformulating a
product or substituting a product on the market with a service-based
alternative. This experience suggests that product changes are the most
difficult for businesses. 

WHAT LED TO THE SUCCESSES OF THE MSRI PROJECT?

All parties entered the MSRI project skeptical that it would reach its
reduction goals. Dow businesses doubted they would uncover good
opportunities. Activists and environmental participants worried that Dow
would not implement the opportunities the project found. Much of the
skepticism on both sides derived from the fact that participants did not
know of a single example of successful similar work. For this reason,
participants dedicated considerable time at the end of the project to
identifying critical factors that led to project successes. Some of the
most important factors include:

     Direct connection of informed activists with manufacturing managers
and engineers 
     Specific goals and deadlines for the project 
     Expert assessment by an experienced pollution prevention assessor 
     Technical assistance to inform the environmental participants 
     Active direct participation by the Dow Midland site leader and
various Dow business        leaders 
     Genuine, active, and fully participatory process mediated by a
facilitator 
     Tracking methods for public accountability of project results 
     Availability of information, particularly data to track wastes and
emissions to        specific production processes 

LESSONS LEARNED

The project produced 4 key lessons:

   1.Significant opportunities exist both to reduce wastes and emissions
and to save companies considerable money.

   2.Barriers to the identification and implementation of these
opportunities are largely institutional: the projects are generally too
small to capture the attention of businesses on their financial merits
(despite high rates of return). Staff is not     sufficiently rewarded
for achieving pollution reduction goals. Larger projects must compete
with other capital priorities within the company and individual
businesses. It is no one's "job" to do pollution prevention per se:
environmental staff priorities are to comply with environmental laws,
and production staff priorities are to get the product out the door. In 
addition, companies generally do not have the opportunity to understand
the concerns held by activists drawn from the community and
environmentalists regarding chemicals used and produced at their sites
in the manner that was made possible through MSRI.

   3.The two most important ingredients for success in projects such as
these are: 1) innovative engineering focused exclusively on pollution
prevention and 2) direct connection of informed activists with
manufacturing managers and engineers. The pollution prevention assessor
dedicated 100 percent of his time to looking only for pollution
prevention opportunities, and his considerable experience gave him
insights into where to look. The activists and environmental
participants created the motivation for businesses to focus on these
opportunities by a date certain and provided Dow a clear rationale for
implementation that went beyond dollars and cents alone.

   4.Institutional change on the part of the manufacturer is far more
difficult to achieve and measure than individual reductions at a given
plant. For true institutional change to take place, the same intense
focus that was needed to find pollution prevention breakthroughs at
Midland will need to be applied to creating and directing lasting
institutional change."

-- 
+----------------------------------------+
Dr Laurence Knight
Environmental Policy and Economics Division 
Queensland Environmental Protection Agency
PO Box 155, Brisbane Albert St, 4002
Tel: (07) 3227 7897  Fax: (07) 3227 8341
E-mail: [log in to unmask]


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