In the late 1980s, environmental management agencies in the
United States and Europe recognized that the traditional framework of controlling
industrial waste and pollution could be improved by encouraging industrial facilities to
be more aggressive about preventing pollution at the source, as well as treating it after
it was created. Several important studies revealed that, even in companies
considered to be well-managed and efficient, much more could be done to reduce pollution
by improving efficiency.
The basic problem was - and still is - that business managers
delegate the management of pollution to pollution control engineers, whose focus is on
treating the wastes to meet government standards. Improving the process efficiency
and product designs is not the traditional job of environmental engineers, so they have
little influence on the basic business operations. And the vast majority of business
managers did not - and still donīt - not know how much it really costs to create all that
waste, even if they donīt pay for treatment (as is the case in most developing
countries). In every case it turns out to be much more expensive than they realized,
which in itself creates motivation for reducing it.
Investigators discovered that they could help almost any
company significantly reduce its resource use, waste and pollution by a systematic
analysis of the sources of waste. It came to be known as going "up the
pipe" from the discharge to the environment, to the production processes, and even
further to the purchasing and supply operations, and ultimately to the design of the
products themselves. But this has to be done with a team of production,
administration, and environmental specialists. The assessment process became
well-established. Management makes a policy commitment to reduce waste and pollution
at the source. A team is formed and an inventory of all inputs and wastes is
created, with a special focus on toxic chemicals. The processes using the inputs and
creating the wastes are analyzed for opportunities to reduce them by improving efficiency,
training, purchasing, and numerous other methods. The opportunities are analyzed,
and the ones that are technically and economically feasible are implemented.
In the USA in 1990 these new ideas and methods were
formalized. The US Environmental Protection Agency
decided to call the approach Pollution Prevention or P2.
The National Pollution Prevention Act was passed by the Congress. It established that P2
was the top priority for protecting the environment from pollution. Treatment is
still critical, but every effort should be made to prevent wastes before they have to be
treated. Recycling is not P2, it is finding another use for something that has
already become a waste. The established a new program on P2. Many US
states then followed this example.
Massachussetts,
New Jersey,
California,
Oregon,
Washington, and
North Carolina are some, but not
all, of the states that have very vigorous P2 programs.
"Pollution Prevention" or P2 is now the term used throughout North
America.
In Europe, at around the same time, the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP), in the office of
Technology,
Industry and Environment in Paris, made similar observations about the need for
prevention. In developing countries, where UNEP is a major resource for
environmental policy, there are weak or no regulations requiring treatment of pollution.
Therefore cost-effective prevention through improved efficiency and business
management is really the only way to reduce pollution from industry. The UNEP called
the approach "Cleaner Production",
or CP, and through strong promotion by UNEP, this became the term used around the world
except in North America.
There is no real difference between
Green business and CP and P2, as
the concepts
have expanded to include the full life cycle of products and processes, and the use of
whatever methods work. However when looking for information about CP or P2, it is
always important to use both terms, in combination with the target keywords. For
example, to find out how to increase efficiency and reduce waste in the textile industry,
it is important to search for both "cleaner production and textiles", and also
"pollution prevention and textiles". This is because the information
produced in North America is almost always called P2, and the information from the rest of
the world is almost always called CP. In Latin America, the term is Produccion Mas
Limpia.
Many new organizations were created to promote CP and P2.
In North America, most of the states and provinces, and many local governments, now
have P2 programs. In Europe, most nations have national and local CP policies and
programs. In the developing world CP has been promoted by the UN and by many
international development agencies, in particular the US Agency for International
Development and the German aid organization, GTZ. There are at
least
several thousand organizations around the world focused exclusively on CP and P2.
They are found in environmental agencies, economic development agencies, local
governments, industry and professional associations, universities, and non-profit
organizations.
"Sustainable
Business" is a relatively recent addition to the
concepts being used and is probably going to become the
most popular term. It covers the "Triple Bottom
Line" of economic, environmental and social performance.
Economic elements of sustainable business tend to focus
around good governance and paying appropriate taxes.
The social elements are much less defined than
environmental elements, since social issues are so
localized around production facilities.
Corporate Social Responsibility and Corporate
Citizenship are now generally synonymous with
Sustainable Business.
Extensive training materials and resources have been developed
for CP and P2, including case studies in nearly every industry, manuals and guidebooks,
new tools and skills for professions such as accounting, design and purchasing, new
management methods, and software and training publications. Almost all of the
materials produced by all these programs were paid for by governments. Consequently
they are not copyright, and are free for duplication and distribution by anyone.
The
information produced by the CP and P2 organizations now constitutes the largest collection
of information in the world about how to improve business performance in general, and
reduce waste and pollution in particular. And it is (almost) all
free.
Conveniently, the birth of CP and P2 coincided with the birth
of the Internet. Very soon, most CP and P2 programs were using the
Internet to publish information about CP and P2 to their customers and the public.
Email networks were created so technical assistance experts can share their questions and
answers with each other around the world. Websites of individual organizations
became linked through major portals, which started creating their own catalogues and links
to the best resources on CP and P2. Now, almost every new publication and tool for
CP and P2 is made available for download over the Internet.
The Purpose of This Collection
However, although many fantastic publications about CP and P2
and sustainable business are available for free download over the Internet, most people
will never obtain them. Access to good Internet
connections is a major problem. One increasing problem is the use of the Portable
Document Format (PDF), promoted by Adobe Systems. This format makes it possible for
anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader software to view any document published in this
format, and it is rapidly becoming an international standard for CP and P2 organizations
to publish their materials. But the use of graphics and color in the PDF format
makes documents very large. There has been a steady increase in the size of the CP
and P2 publications available for download. Many of them are well over 500kb in
size, and some are over 2 megabytes. On a typical dial-up connection to the Internet
at 56 kb per second, a 1 megabyte document takes about 20 minutes to download. In
many countries all calls, including Internet dial-up, are billed by the minute. The
bigger the document, the more it costs to obtain it. And no matter where you are,
the longer it takes, the less likely you are to download it. Therefore, by making
the documents and programs available on CD-ROM, people with small budgets and poor
Internet access, or limited time on line, can still obtain them.
And there are so many choices. Sometimes it seems that
every large CP or P2 program wants to re-invent the wheel with their own publications on
the same topics. Everyone publishes their own fact sheets and short guides. There
are at least several dozen high-quality manuals about how to implement a CP or P2 program.
Similar duplication of content, with some variation of course, exists in almost
every sub-topic of CP and P2. Some organizations have created their own collections
of the "best" publications on particular topics. The
P2Pays program is probably the
best example. However, space on web servers is limited, and most collections for
download can only offer a limited number of documents. People interested in a
particular topic still need to surf around the Internet to find good resources.
The Greatest Hits of CP and P2 collection on CDROM has been
designed to solve these problems. All the documents were chosen by the editor,
Prof. Burton Hamner, because of their high quality.
They can be considered to be among the best, if not the best, in their area.
Also, they were chosen because they are relatively large, and therefore hard to
download, and therefore unavailable to many people. By putting the documents on
CDROM, they are now available to the millions of people who will never otherwise know
about them or obtain them because of lack of fast internet connections.
About Copyright and Distribution
All of the documents included in the collection are free of restrictions on
distribution, to the best of our knowledge. They were all downloaded directly from
the Internet. None of the publishers charges for the resource, although some of them
ask that you register online for free to obtain them. Such cases are explicitly
noted in the document descriptions, and you are asked to go to the publisherīs website
and register with them if you intend to use the resource in any significant way.
You can obtain these documents and resources directly from the Internet for
free. To find them, just type the name of the document into a good search engine
such as Google. Use quote marks ""
around the entire title, to be sure it is listed at the top of the search results.
Anyone who wants these documents does not have to purchase this CD, if they have good
access to the Internet and a computer that can store them. Library computers that
cannot make CD copies of large documents can still be used to email them to your own
computer for download.
Since all these resources are available for free download, they are considered
to be in the public domain. We believe that their publishers will be happy that many
more people will use them. Several of the documents are no longer available for
download, but they were produced by public agencies and thus are also public domain.
Some of the documents are also available on CDROM from their publishers.
The descriptive text on the CDROM is COPYRIGHT 2006
Cleaner Production International LLC.
The CDROM can NOT be duplicated "as is" without violating our copyright.
We ask that the CDROM not be mass-duplicated for distribution by others without
permission. Many hundreds of hours went into its production, and it represents many
years of work in CP by Prof. Hamner in evaluating documents and resources. If you
want to duplicate the CDROM, please contact us to discuss it.
