Environmentally conscious product design through total quality management

The actions of governments, customers, and competitors are influencing corporate environmental management in unprecedented ways. Market requirements are affecting both revenues and costs in ways that individual firms cannot control. The uncertainty that these new requirements create underscores the critical importance of planning and implementing a systematic approach to the design of products and the processes used to build, ship, support, and recover them. In this article the author shows how Total Quality Management offers a useful framework for aligning a company'S market focus, its business plans, and its management of critical business processes. This alignment is critical, if companies are to create environmentally conscious products while remaining competitive in a global marketplace.     

The environmental quality business plan: A step-by-step guide

Companies that have the most effective environmental programs are those that have integrated environmental management into the business process. In order to take an environmental program to a higher level, we must determine a way to get business leaders to acknowledge the business benefit of environmental programs. Business integration becomes more likely when you speak the language of management and present tools that they regularly use. Most companies use business plans, therefore the use of an environmental quality business plan is a segue into the business. To catch management's attention, we must present cost improvement projects that will be part of the environmental quality business plan that affect the bottom line. Examples of the types of projects that could potentially save the company millions of dollars are reducing the cost of remediation, or pollution-prevention projects such as minimizing packaging and the elimination of chemical use and waste. Once we catch management's attention, we can get them involved in developing an environmental quality business plan and thus get more business integration and support.     

Questions and answers. TQEM performance indicators—how do you measure up?

I have seen a number of corporations accept the philosophy of TQEM and start the process of total quality environmental management with great enthusiasm. I believe that many organizations are attracted because TQM principles demand measurements of success and results that are definable for the environment. It reduces the emotionalism that frequently tends to surround environmental issues. Emotionalism has perhaps been the bane and boon of efforts by corporations and advocacy groups to incorporate environmental issues into the day-to-day functions of organizations. Abt Associates, a well-known research-based consulting firm, recently completed a study of U.S. Fortune 250 firms' environmental management programs. Abt found evidence that environmental performance is a competitive issue. Benchmarking is hotly pursued to develop firm-wide indices of performance. One third of the benchmarking is against competition, another third is against worldwide firms. There is a race to develop “Best in Class” standards now. E2M and Abt Associates have combined resources to study corporate Canada's environmental management programs and compare these with those of the United States. This research will help companies benchmark activities and will build a strong North American data base. Unfortunately it will not be ready in time to answer TQEM's question for this issue. (The study results will be released to participating companies in Fall 1992.)     

Total quality product design—how to integrate environmental criteria into the product realization process

Recent case studies on the financial benefits of pollution prevention programs well attest to the notion that a commitment to the environment can help profitability not only by avoiding costs and potential liabilities, but also by generating environmentally-based opportunities for competitive advantage. Achieving these benefits, however, represents a complex management challenge that requires embedding environmental concerns in the day-to-day decisions and actions of a company'S employees. This article shows how the marriage of corporate environmental stewardship and TQM, better known as TQEM, is particularly well suited to the area of product design and why environmental health and safety experts can improve a product'S environmental performance.     

Monitoring and measurement systems for implementing ISO 14001

There is a lot of work involved in establishing an effective and useful monitoring and measurement system, but it can be a critical tool for business success. With reliable data based on important performance metrics, you can quantify environmental and business improvement; communicate success; provide valuable input to environmental objectives, targets, and programs; and make sound business decisions based on facts. This article details how companies can set up procedures, processes, and schedules using ISO 14001 to monitor regulatory compliance and help establish an integrated management system.     

Environmental management information systems: New tools for measuring performance

Successful implementation of environmental management information systems (EMIS) has become essential to the success of total quality environmental management (TQEM) programs. Effective TQEM programs will be early indicators of which companies survive and thrive in today's competitive business environment. Highly competitive industries such as chemicals, electronics, and oil and gas are becoming very effective in cooperating to develop metrics, models, and tools that are based on business processes rather than regulatory edicts. Now electric power companies, newly exposed to market competition, are starting to develop and implement these metrics, standards, and tools. That industry provides a model for joining TQEM and EMIS.     

Why—and how to—benchmark for environmental excellence

Benchmarking your company'S environmental program against that of another company or organization is one of the more effective means of assuring it is on track toward environmental excellence. If used properly and objectively, it provides a means of gauging the progress of your environmental program while allowing both companies to benefit from new and innovative ideas for improvement. Benchmarking is capable of measuring program efficiency, program design, and program outputs. Benchmarking also provides environmental managers the unique opportunity of sharing successes and failures with respect to program integration into operations. This article describes the steps involved in designing and implementing benchmarking to assess the design of an overall environmental management program.     

Case study: Sonoco's materials reclamation improves environmental performance through quality-based management

Multinational corporations are facing increasing pressures and finding stronger incentives to integrate environmental management into their overall business strategies. National and local environmental regulations are becoming more stringent in Europe, Japan, East and Southeast Asia, Latin America, and many developing countries, and international voluntary standards of environmental management are being endorsed by a growing number of governments. Multinational firms are embracing these standards not only to assure the public of their concern for environmental protection, but also to enhance their competitiveness in international markets. The British Standard 7750, the European Eco-Management and Audit Scheme (EMAS), and the ISO 14000 series are setting new guidelines for effective corporate environmental management. Beyond complying with local and national laws, corporations now have wider latitude in how they adapt their business practices to these emerging environmental management standards. In order to capitalize on that creative latitude, companies must have corporate cultures and internal management systems that allow them to respond quickly and effectively to changing environmental requirements. Exemplary corporate environmental performance is usually related to strong and progressive leadership, a culture that recognizes the importance of environmental protection, and the willingness to operate by quality-based management principles. This article describes how one international corporation, Sonoco, in responding successfully to changing environmental pressures to reclaim and recycle its products in the wake of the solid waste crisis in the United States and more stringent environmental regulations in Europe, used its management competencies and corporate culture to turn what could have been serious barriers to expansion of its core businesses into new opportunities. By adopting a bold materials reclamation program, Sonoco was able to overcome potential limitations on its operations in the United States and abroad and to develop new business segments that benefited the company and the environment.     

Product life cycle: The key to integrating ehs into corporate decision making and operations

A consensus is emerging that traditional environmental health and safety (EHS) programs—characterized by EHS professionals serving a support function to a company's main operations—represent only part of effective EHS management. In order to be truly successful, EHS management must go beyond this format and integrate EHS considerations into the corporation itself, from its strategic corporate decision making to its everyday operations on the manufacturing floor. Only when EHS becomes part of the fabric of a business's activity will EHS risks and costs be truly minimized—and the many potential benefits fully realized. This article discusses how to make this goal a reality by use of the manufacturing and product life cycle (PLC) perspective. It will first stress the importance of integrating EHS considerations into corporate decision making and operations. It will then trace the critical steps for achieving such integration through the use of the PLC, concentrating particularly on a General Electric Company (GE) chemical management process that weaves EHS concerns into every stage of day-to-day operations.     

Do environmental management programs improve environmental performance trends? a study of standard & poors 500 companies

In this article, environmental management programs of Standard & Poors (S&P) 500 companies were evaluated using a series of industry and size-adjusted environmental trend indicators. The statistical analysis shows that a handful of corporate policy, governance, human resources, auditing, and financial parameters are highly relevant to improving corporate environmental performance. The results have implications for corporate environmental efforts as well as future government policies to foster environmental improvement.     

Motivations for Adopting the ISO 14001 Standard: A Study of Spanish Industrial Companies

This article analyzes what motivates companies to obtain ISO 14001 certification and what factors within companies determine the success or failure of the environmental management standard. The most important motivators appear to be the worldwide recognition accorded the ISO 14000 norm, and its applicability to all sectors. The factors that most contribute to success are the company's experience in management systems and involvement by management. Failure most often results from lack of employee training and organizational rigidity. © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Making pollution prevention part of the coors culture

This article is about Total Quality Management and its relationship to corporate environmental affairs. As the TQM movement expands, the commitment to continuous quality improvement, customer satisfaction, and collaborative, team-oriented workplaces is finding new applications. Just as the success of Federal Express, AT&T, and other winners of the Malcolm Baldrige National Quality Award shows that Total Quality Management can transform a business, we also are learning of successes companies are having applying TQM principles to environmental management. Our experience with TQM and environmental management at Coors Brewing Company is in the area of pollution prevention. In addition to our brewing operations, we also operate the country's largest aluminum can manufacturing plant, where we produce 4 billion cans a year, a separate facility that makes the can tops, a glass bottle manufacturing plant, and various support facilities. In all, we have some 7,000 employees, and building a commitment to pollution prevention in an operation of that size requires much more than just adopting quality principles. In this article we show how it also means understanding how those principles will mesh with the corporate culture. What we found is that before TQM can begin its magic, a company must review its own culture to see how problems have traditionally been solved and how challenges have been met.     

Long-time environmental leadership pays off in many ways at herman miller

HermanMiller, Inc. is recognized as one of the most environmentally responsive companies in the United States. It recently received the coveted President'S Environment and Conservation Challenge Award. Top management credits the company'S forty-year-old participatory management tradition as a key to its environmental success. This article shows how these “bottom-up” initiatives have created impressive “bottom-line” results.     

From a culture of fixing to a culture of preventing at arm & hammer brand

Companies with a total quality management program in place are beginning to understand the need for of a fuller integration of environmental and health and safety functions within their overall quality framework. Intense international competition, a flat global economy, and an increasingly stringent environmental and health and safety regulatory climate are forcing management to consolidate whatever gains they have made on the compliance side. At the same time, a total quality approach demands flattening of hierarchies, increased empowerment in divisions and plant floors, and much greater integration through a team approach of most management functions. Making all of this work puts a heavy premium on communication and individual responsibility. As companies that are going through the process now understand, this calls for major changes in corporate culture and a deep commitment from top management. This article describes the quality improvement process at Church & Dwight, makers of the Arm & Hammer line of products, where the TQEM challenge is orchestrated by a triumvirate representing three management functions: engineering, quality, and marketing/public relations.     

Mixed methodology to analyze the relationship between maturity of environmental management and the adoption of green supply chain management in Brazil

The aim of this research is to verify the relationship between the maturity levels of environmental management and the adoption of green supply chain management (GSCM) practices by electro-electronic companies in Brazil. In this work a two-phase research was conducted, with one quantitative and the other qualitative. The quantitative phase aimed to test whether a relationship between the maturity levels of environmental management and GSCM exists, while the qualitative phase tried to detail the characteristics of this relationship. The quantitative phase was conducted through a survey with 100 Brazilian electro-electronic companies and the collected data were processed using Structural Equation Modeling. For the qualitative phase, a multiple case study was conducted with three companies located in Brazil. The results indicate that: (1) The main hypothesis was confirmed and considered statistically valid, indicating that, indeed, the maturity level of environmental management influences the adoption of GSCM practices; (2) a coevolution tends to occur between the environmental maturity and the GSCM practices; that is, the more developed is the company's environmental management, more complex GSCM practices are adopted; and (3) the GSCM internal practices tend to present a greater relative adoption than the external practices; these external practices of GSCM tend to be adopted when the company is inserted in a higher environmental stage and/or operates under a scenario of stronger normative environmental pressure. By the way, this is the first research mixing survey and case studies on GSCM in Brazil.     

Reducing life-cycle environmental impacts: An industry survey of emerging tools and programs

Corporate environmental practices have been evolving quite rapidly in recent years, as consumers express their preferences for environmentally friendly products and practices, as manufacturers look “upstream” and inquire into their suppliers' environmental practices due to liability and marketing concerns, and as company operating costs increase as a result of new environmental regulations. New corporate efforts are made to anticipate (rather than respond to) outside environmental pressures, to internalize costs, and to find strategic opportunities or competitive advantages based on company or product environmental performance. This article describes a survey and research project designed to explore one aspect of these evolving corporate practices—the use of analytical tools and associated programs, such as life-cycle assessment and design-for-environment—by companies to account for impacts throughout a product'S life-cycle.     

Beyond pollution prevention: A vision for an integrated environmental business management strategy

In this article the authors assert that successful long-term pollution prevention will require changes in the culture and business practices of an organization such that the term “pollution prevention” eventually becomes obsolete. They envision firms evolving to a point where actions that today are referred to as pollution prevention will simply be part of standard business practices and thoroughly embedded in the firms' culture. Although pollution prevention projects and programs need to be highly visible at the outset to communicate throughout the organization and to demonstrate the benefits that can be gained, companies should adopt a long-term strategy aimed at making fundamental changes in the way they do business, rather than relying solely on piecemeal projects and special plans or programs. Such evolution of the firm will maximize the chances of meeting the dual challenges of business competitiveness and environmental stewardship. This article presents a vision for integrating environmental performance with business objectives and suggests practical steps to begin moving toward that vision.     

MEB's university-community partnerships foster new environmental leaders for business

As our society's environmental concerns have grown over the past 20 years, U.S. firms have struggled to find effective and inexpensive ways to meet their mushrooming environmental obligations. Many firms, recognizing the competitive advantages to be won through adroit environmental management, have begun to seek managers trained to deal with these issues. The corporate response has been hobbled by business schools'general failure to train managers to deal with crossfunctional issues, and by a specific failure to address environmental management in their curricula. In this article, the Management Institute for Environment and Business, a program of the World Resources Institute (WRI), describes its innovative University-Community Partnerships (UCP) project to address these shortcomings. Bringing new approaches and new thinking to management curricula, MEB and several like-minded organizations are breathing new life into the old MBA programs.     

Strategic environmental product planning within Philips sound & vision

Until now no structured methodology existed for attuning environmental considerations to the business strategy of companies. The Environmental Competence Centre of Philips Sound & Vision in The Netherlands has developed and tested a methodology for this purpose. This methodology, called Selection of STRrategic Environmen Tal CHallenges (STRETCH), has proven to lead to promising results and should therefore be actively promoted. In this article, the authors show how the application of STRETCH provides the possibility of meeting three main objectives: First, focusing on the incorporation of environmental aspects into the company's business strategy can elicit innovations that may enhance the competitive position of the company by cost reduction and/or higher market shares. Second, the environmental opportunities and threats to be expected in the future can be anticipated in an earlier phase. Through this proactive approach a company can avoid external criticism and take the lead in environmental priority setting. Third, by applying the STRETCH methodology even higher eco-efficiencies are expected to be reached than through incremental, step-by-step environmental improvements.     

基于重点排污单位的上市公司环境信息披露现状分析

本文选取264家母公司属环保部门公布的重点排污单位的上市公司作为研究对象,将样本企业在2016年年报、2017年半年报及2016年度社会责任报告等定期报告中披露的环境信息,对照上市公司年报与半年报中环境信息披露的要求与规范,对上市公司环境信息披露合规性进行评估。评估认为:上市公司通过定期报告披露环境信息在形式上和内容上均有所进步,但距离基本的形式上合规披露仍有显著差距,信息披露的全面性、有效性与针对性更远远不能满足强化环保监管与优化资本市场的目标本意与政策需求。基于上述评估结果与发现的问题,本文提出了制定管理办法与技术导则、提升政策层级与规范披露标准,强化部门协作等政策建议。