Applying tqem practices to pollution prevention at AT&T's columbus works plant

In recent years AT&T changed its focus on environmental policies from compliance to pollution prevention. Pollution prevention is an integrated program that includes design for the environment, “green” manufacturing, and a comprehensive program to reduce existing waste in production. The principles of Total Quality Management can be applied to pollution prevention as well as the more traditional manufacturing concepts. The project described in this article is one of several concurrent programs being conducted at AT&T'S Columbus Works to reduce overall waste produced by the facility by applying TQM practices.     

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.     

Introducing design for the environment at boeing defense and space group through the application of abridged life-cycle analysis

The streamlined, matrix approach to environmental Life-Cycle Analysis (LCA) developed originally at AT&T by Graedel and Allenby can be adapted to manufacturing processes to produce a useful tool for Design for the Environment (DFE). Pollution prevention in manufacturing has typically focused on the environmental impact of processes at a manufacturer's site. However, it is important to recognize that a process has a “life cycle,” albeit not precisely like the life cycle associated with a product. Modification of processes can also have upstream and downstream effects. In this article, the authors show how, by using a streamlined LCA matrix, it is possible to evaluate the environmental impact associated with a process over the process's life cycle. This approach also allows managers to allocate resources to improve processes that have greater environmental impact and to assess process improvements.     

Elements of effective DFE program management and product stewardship

Design for the Environment (DFE) is a systems-oriented approach for designing more ecologically and economically sustainable product systems. It couples the product development cycle used in business with the physical life-cycle of a product. DFE integrates environmental requirements into the earliest stages of design so total impacts caused by product systems can be reduced. With DFE practices, environmental, performance, cost, cultural, and legal requirements are balanced. Concepts such as concurrent design, total quality management, cross-disciplinary teams, and multiattribute decision making are essential elements of DFE.¹ In this article, the authors show how these DFE initiatives can provide the design and product development teams with the training, information, decision support tools, and procedures that ensure improved product development decisions and environmental performance.     

Implementing industrial ecology and design for environment practices: Lawrence livermore national laboratory

Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL), one of the nation's three national security laboratories, is initiating a major research effort in industrial ecology with the goal of increasing the economic and environmental efficiency of the U.S. and global economies. Closer to home, ongoing efforts to reduce LLNL's environmental impact on the surrounding community provide an example of how the environmental efficiency of a major research facility can be systematically improved. In the late 1980s, LLNL initiated its waste minimization and pollution prevention program, changing its focus from end-of-pipe waste management to a proactive and preventive strategy—total quality environmental management (TQEM). LLNL's success in integrating pollution prevention with R&D and operational activities is well illustrated by the waste reduction and energy and water conservation accomplishments described in this article. LLNL represents a model of how industrial ecology, design for environment, and pollution prevention can be incorporated into a comprehensive R&D and operational program. This article describes LLNL's developing industrial ecology program, gives some specific technical accomplishments that have application to many industrial facilities, and presents a case study of TQEM at LLNL's remote experimental test facility, Site 300. The integration of TQEM philosophy with LLNL's scientific capabilities holds much promise for new ideas and creative solutions to national and international industrial ecology concerns.     

Industry's role in air quality improvement: Environmental management opportunities for the 21st century

More than 200 years ago, Adam Smith, the founder of modern economics, wrote in the Wealth of Nations that “…consumption is the sole end and purpose of all production; and the interest of the producer ought to be attention to…that of the consumer.” In recent years, the rapid growth of the world economy has given Adam Smith's maxim new meaning. The age-old desire for consumption grows unabated and increasing numbers of consumers around the world are attaching new value to the environmental quality of goods and services and expressing concern over the environmental impacts of industrialization. That concern is growing because more than 70 percent of the world's urban population live in areas where the air is seriously polluted and as many as 750,000 people—the majority in developing countries—die each year of ailments caused by air pollution.¹ Over the past 25 years, corporations throughout the world have made dramatic changes in the way they do business as more people come to understand how the ecological system works and how polluted air and water endanger human health. The key to increasing industry's participation in the drive for higher standards of air quality is the growing realization that effective environmental management, technological development, and technology dissemination are cost-effective and profitable business strategies. Global competition is making firms around the world more customer-conscious and, to the extent that consumers demand products that minimize environmental degradation and enhance the quality of their lives, businesses in every industry must respond in order to survive.² This article examines how changes in business practices, driven by a better understanding of how natural environments function, are converging to provide new opportunities for environmental management that go beyond regulatory compliance to reduce air pollution. Although sound and well-enforced environmental regulations are an essential foundation for improving air quality, command-and-control systems alone are unlikely to achieve the lower levels of pollution that will be necessary to achieve sustainable development in the 21st century. In cooperation with government, businesses in every industry can play crucial roles in achieving higher standards of air quality while at the same time maintaining acceptable levels of economic growth. We explore three ways in which corporations can contribute to environmentally sustainable development: (1) by adopting proactive environmental management systems that focus on air pollution prevention; (2) by developing new technologies for air pollution control and reduction; and (3) by transferring air pollution control and prevention technologies through international trade and investment.     

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.     

Maintaining your EMS: The stages of EMS development

Registering to ISO 14001 doesn't mean you're forever green. If you want an environmental management system (EMS) to keep moving your organization forward to improved environmental and business performance, you need to maintain and refine it. The first step toward doing so is understanding the stages that each EMS goes through on its way to full business integration. © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

Business-oriented environmental performance metrics: Building consensus for environmental management systems

Today, environmental managers are learning new ways of adding value to their organizations. Before, the environmental department was an overhead expense—an indirect support group required for complying with burdensome regulations. Now, such departments add insights and value during strategic planning sessions, identify efficiency improvement opportunities, provide a superior return on investment, and—bottom line—improve profits. The primary approach to meeting the challenge is a new environmental management system (EMS) that identifies, measures, and manages a diverse set of internal and external customer needs. These needs include environmental cleanups, regulatory compliance, pollution prevention, and design for the environment—and each represents a potential improvement opportunity. Unfortunately, most organizations have so many such needs that all cannot be addressed at once, given the resource constraints of a competitive business climate. Thus, priority is a key concept of an effective EMS. This article describes an innovative application of consensus-building tools that quickly identify and set priorities for diverse environmental programs. The article also shows how appropriate performance measures will align these programs with corporate goals and objectives.     

Business excellence through resource efficiency (betre): An evaluation of the UKs highest recruiting, facilitated self-help waste minimisation project

The business excellence through resource efficiency (betre) project aimed to increase awareness of the benefits of waste minimisation for SMEs in West Sussex, South East England. The programme was run by the West Sussex Sustainable Business Partnership, a collaboration of all West Sussex Local Authorities, the Environment Agency and EcoSys (a service provider). Betre provided a range of free business support and advice over an 18-month period including; workshops, newsletters, audits, grants and a technical Helpline. Information on environmental compliance and Best Practice for waste minimisation, recycling, energy and water efficiency was disseminated. All activities were linked with the UK government's Best Practice programmes. Although company recruitment was initially slow, betre was ultimately extremely successful at attracting companies to join; with 308 recruited. This is probably the most successful recruitment to a project, of this type, in the UK to date. Over half of the business members became actively involved and attended training events or had environmental audits. There were over 200 improvement actions identified by 64 of the participating companies. These resulted in estimated cost savings of at least £215 000 per annum. In addition, actions taken to prevent pollution and ensure compliance with environmental legislation have the potential to save businesses a further £204 000 in possible penalties. The environmental impact of the project has been significant, with reductions identified in waste (1437 tonnes), water (62 933 m³) and energy (15 million kW h—equivalent to 668 tonnes CO₂). In addition to actions with directly measurable results, betre has stimulated long-term benefits by addressing pollution prevention and compliance, through the formulation of environmental policies and from the adoption of Environmental Management Systems. One of the key learning points is that it may have been better to devote less time to running training events and instead to have diverted this time to increased business support, mainly through audits. To capitalise on this success, a new project is being planned to disseminate Best Practice.     

Quality metrics in design for environment

There is a growing commitment by manufacturers, both in the United States and abroad, to assure environmental responsibility for all of their operations. This trend is driven partly by market demands for “green” products and partly by changes in international standards and regulations. In response, leading companies are demonstrating that environmental improvement can actually increase profitability, and design for environment (DFE) is emerging as an important business practice. The ability to evaluate environmental quality in objective, measurable terms is a key component of an effective DFE capability. In particular, environmental quality metrics are essential to support goal setting, monitoring, and continuous improvement in the design of products and processes. This article describes environmental quality measurement tools and procedures, particularly as they relate to DFE. One of the challenges of performance measurement is to incorporate a life-cycle view of environmental performance into measurement tools that can be easily computed and tracked.     

Reducing anthropogenic environmental stresses: A review on cleaner production and industrial ecology

Cleaner production (CP) provides source control measures of minimizing the waste and emissions occurred by the production and processes. CP, which is also known by the term pollution prevention (P2), has been practiced for several years among various countries across the world. Practicing of CP in industries supports in optimization of materials utilization, lowering the energy consumption, and the reduction of emissions to air, water, and soil. CP provides a continuous and preventive environmental improvement for the organizations by focusing on the prevention rather than providing solutions, once the pollution has been occurred. Implementing CP in a business requires support from the employees from top to bottom levels in the hierarchy, to obtain a successful and long‐term outcome. Thus, CP is no longer considered as a standalone process and should be integrated in the entire business development activities, in order to improve the quality of life. CP can also be identified as a subset of industrial ecology, which focuses on designing the industrial processes, products, and services, in order to minimize the environmental concerns of the industrial activities. This article will provide an overview of the background of CP, the CP assessment methodology, and the concepts of industrial ecology.     

Using life-cycle assessments in large corporations: A survey of current practices

Industries presently face a challenge to maintain competitiveness while creating minimal adverse impacts on the environment. The conventional concerns of product functionality, quality, and cost are further complicated by environmental considerations. Thus, corporate environmental strategies are evolving toward a life-cycle approach by implementing life-cycle analysis (LCA), design for environment (DFE), and environmentally conscious design and manufacturing (ECDM) practices. These life-cycle concepts provide a tool for industry to identify and evaluate opportunities to minimize environmental burdens from cradle to grave. A mail survey administered by Vanderbilt University's U.S.-Japan Center for Technology Management was sent to 175 U.S. corporations from the 1994 Fortune 500 list. The results show that more than half of the 56 respondents are using life-cycle concepts for environmental assessments, with marketing and cost issues as the primary motivation factors. Hi-tech and personal care firms are more active in implementing LCAs while chemical and intermediate companies are more involved with maintaining databases and utilizing LCA tools. The survey and this article show how life-cycle thinking has not been adequately integrated throughout corporate organizations, and most environmental efforts are initiated by the environmental affairs department. However, the percentage of top management involvement has increased since 1992 and is now at moderate levels. LCA methods need to be further developed in order to expand their industrial acceptability.     

Environmental accounting—making it work for your company

There is no simple recipe for success in implementing environmental accounting. Day-to-day needs and strategic objectives will determine how an organization can benefit from environmental accounting. Our previous article listed many potential applications of environmental accounting and discussed common environmental accounting objectives.¹ This article is geared toward organizations that want to start implementing environmental accounting and create a foundation of success on which to build. In this context, the questions are (1) What are some logical starting points? and (2) Where do companies go from there? This article first describes some paradigms that may guide companies as they think about how to implement environmental accounting, then it presents a series of critical activities that are needed to make environmental accounting an integral part of ongoing business management functions.     

Trends in Toxic Chemical Releases: A Case Study on the Drug Industry in Connecticut and New Jersey

To analyse trends in toxic chemical releases, an empirical study was conducted on Connecticut's and New Jersey's drug industry. It was the purpose of this study to investigatethese trends based on the following three questions: first, what is the trend of toxic chemical releases in the drug industry?; second, does the drug industry show patterns of qualitative growth?;and third, does the drug industry show substantial release reductionsof chemicalsknown to be highly toxic to public health and ecosystems? This analysis used the Toxics Release Inventory TRI data from 1988 to 1993. Given the trends, plausible driving forces for the observed changes in toxic chemical releases in the drug industry over the past five years are discussed. The study contends that the following four driving forces are most important in the illustrated development:the TRI, a publicly available database, can be used to reveal severe polluters; the TRI increased corporations' awareness of effective toxic chemical releases and may be used to reflect corporations' communicated commitment to sustainable development; federal and state environmental protection agencies enhance pollution prevention activities in a co-operative manner; and finally, since the late 1980s, the awareness of the business benefits of pollution prevention continuously increases.     

Are EMS environmentally effective? The link between environmental management systems and environmental performance in European companies

Based on the analysis of a large dataset on the environmental performance of European companies in five industrial sectors, this paper examines the question of whether the presence of an environmental management system (EMS) has a positive impact on the eco-efficiency of companies. It begins with a review of evidence about the link between EMS and environmental performance in business organisations, finding that, despite much research, there is still little quantitative evidence. The second part of the paper uses three independent statistical methods (simple correlations, Jaggi-Freedman indices and a ‘trend differences’ approach) to assess whether companies and production sites with EMS perform better than those without and whether performance improves after an EMS has been introduced. The paper shows that there is currently no evidence that EMS have a consistent and significant positive impact on environmental performance. Policy action based on the simple assumption that companies with an EMS perform better than those without therefore seems inappropriate.     

Strengthening business with a new vision at avery dennison

This article presents a case study regarding initiatives, apparent failures, and successes that the Avery Dennison Materials Group organization encountered over the last five years in creating and sustaining environmental awareness throughout its organization. This awareness encompasses considerations thought to position the organization to compete against the core elements proposed within the ISO 14001 environmental management system protocol. While Avery Dennison's Materials Group has undertaken many initiatives which strive to achieve business integration, this article focuses primarily on three environmental management systems believed to be the foundation for a manufacturing or service organization—a foundation built on sustainable compliance, incorporation of quality management concepts, and the fulfillment of environmental performance expectations driven by the community at large. Those three programs are (1) an Environmental Stewardship Policy with specific environmental operating principles, (2) Environmental Control Instructions (ECIs), which establish accountability for proper operation, and (3) an Environmental Management System Assessment similar to the Global Environmental Management Initiatives (GEMI) environmental self-assessment tool. These cornerstones provide a basis for the construction of a management program pyramid, the top of which results in a quality process for making effective business decisions by integrating core environmental operating principles.     

ISO 14001 registration: The process,the benefits,and the choice of registrar

This article introduces the concept of ISO 14001 registration, outlines related assessment processes, and reviews the drivers behind developing an ISO-14001-concordant environmental management system (EMS) and seeking third party registration of that EMS. It focuses on registration strategies for larger organizations and considerations in choosing a registrar, including: auditor qualifications, standards for the conduct of EMS audits, and some issues for audit and registration service providers. The authors conclude that it is beneficial to pursue an ISO-14001-concordant EMS and that the value of the system can be enhanced through registration. However, some thought should be given to choosing the appropriate registrar, in particular to their EMS and audit approaches and to the qualifications of their audit team. Service providers are also cautioned to remember that ISO 14001 is not the same as ISO 9000, and that the registrar's standard of care in the discharge of their work should reflect that. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.     

A strategy for integrating NEPA with EMS and ISO 14000

It is vital that federal managers consider new approaches for enhancing environmental protection while reducing redundancies and cost. Faced with increasing environmental issues, compliance requirements, competing resources, and tightened budget constraints, agencies must seek innovative approaches for doing more with less. The diverse array of confusing and sometimes inappropriate or conflicting regulatory requirements compounds compliance complexities and increases the need to seek resourceful solutions. At a time when NEPA is coming under closer congressional scrutiny, an integrated NEPA/EMS paradigm provides a key for increasing the effectiveness and uniformity of implementing NEPA at the early planning stage, while reducing cost, delays, and redundancies. Effectively integrated, NEPA satisfies one of the five, and perhaps most important, principles of an EMS-environmental planning. NEPA's regulatory requirements not only are consistent with the objective of an EMS, but actually enhance the effectiveness of an EMS. An integrated approach provides the added benefit of increased environmental coordination and heightened communications that translates into further cost reduction and fewer delays. The strategy described in this article is designed to balance the rigors of an international standard with the need to efficiently implement an integrated NEPA/EMS system, given a diverse set of challenging circumstances and constraints.