Company Environmental and Sustainability: Pollution Prevention

Going green and being a sustainable company is a complex structure that requires commitment and many inputs. For many years, companies have battled with environmentalists and government regulations to stay competitive. The article “Green and Competitive: Ending the Stalemate” attempts to explain those challenges through the discussion of pollution due to inefficiencies, innovation and resource productivity, questioning the need of regulations, the cost of a static mindset and the debate over good regulations over bad ones. The attitude of “this is how we’ve always done it” should not continue in Corporate America if companies want to better the environment and have a competitive advantage.

Companies can increase sales, create more employment opportunities, boost morale and become the leader in their market by looking outside of the box an addressing the never-ending debate over going green and staying competitive.

Pollution due to inefficiencies in the business cycle of an organization does not only amount to increase waste in our environment, but it amounts to millions of dollars a company is throwing away due to their poor executed approach to handling waste.

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The article discusses how a company should shift from a pollution control mentality to one focused on prevention. By doing so, companies can target the actual cost of eliminating pollution. Environmental improvement efforts have traditionally overlooked these systems costs. Instead, they have focused on pollution control through better identification, processing, and disposal of discharges or waste—costly approaches. In recent years, more advanced companies and regulators have embraced the concept of pollution prevention, sometimes called source reduction, which uses such methods as material substitution and closed-loop processes to limit pollution before it occurs.

In the past, companies have felt that they were doing their part to save the environment by adding additional equipment or resources in their process, but in fact they were creating unnecessary waste that usually went hidden throughout a product’s life cycle. A new movement in the business world is recognizing that extra consideration must be throughout the process and design of a product. Viewing defects as a sign of inefficient product and process design—not as an inevitable by-product of manufacturing—was a breakthrough. Companies now strive to build quality into the entire process. The new mind-set unleashed the power of innovation to relax or eliminate what companies had previously accepted as fixed trade-offs.

Another interesting point introduced in this article is the benefits of innovation and resource productivity. Embracing innovation allows businesses to develop and implement new technology into their process that could reduce or eliminate pollution. Innovation can also provide companies alternatives to managing the waste produced by converting the waste into something of value. For example, DOW Chemical has made important steps to increase their feedstock recycling program by breaking down a mix of waste by-products into their original form to manufacture new products. Instead of disposing the unusable product, DOW through innovation has been able to create value in a material once considered to be waste.

Resource productivity is becoming a top priority in the business world due to supply and demand. The need to find alternative sources that meet or exceed the requirements necessary to manufacture products is a growing concern due the scarcity of raw materials from the increasing demand of emerging markets. Companies can also benefit from resource productivity by identifying lower cost alternatives to improve their marginal profits or utilizing existing equipment and processes to improve production time, thus reducing waste and energy. Do we really need regulations? I feel this answer is “Yes”.

We need regulations due to the lack of time and commitment most businesses spend on improving their business model. The amount of time to thoroughly investigate and implement an action plan for improving the business would be overlooked due to the cost associated with the project. Human nature causes businesses to procrastinate and delay costly projects, so the requirement for government agencies to set environmental regulations and timelines for businesses to follow is an unfortunate necessity for businesses to meet compliance. Static thinking is a problem that prevents many companies from being competitive because they focus all their resources on fighting the environmental regulations instead of acquiring an advantage through innovation and resource productivity.

Regulators and companies should focus on relaxing the trade-off between environmental protection and competitiveness. Yet the current adversarial climate drives up the costs of meeting environmental standards and circumscribes the innovation benefits, making the trade-off far steeper than it needs to be. In addition to being high cost, the current system of environmental regulation in the United States often deters innovative solutions or renders them impossible. The problem with regulation is not its strictness. It is the way in which standards are written and the sheer inefficiency with which regulations are administered.

Due to the issues related to the poor handling of regulations, the opportunity over the years to reduce our carbon footprint on this Planet has taken a step back. Instead of working together for the common good, the continuous push back by businesses has prevented our society to be further ahead in improving the global environment. We need to develop regulations that meet our growing concerns, but are also received in a positive manner by businesses, so they stay competitive. Finally, businesses must focus on the benefits associated with making improvements in their processes through innovation and resource productivity in order to capture a competitive advantage in the market; resisting change will only cause demise. By asking the right questions and working with government agencies, businesses will add value to their business model.