CLEAN MANUFACTURING:MOTIVATION

MOTIVATION

The environmental impacts of manufacturing may include resource depletion, energy consumption, air pollutants, water pollutants, and both hazardous and nonhazardous solid waste. Table 1 shows the hazards associated with general environmental impacts.

Metrics

The simplest metric for environmental impact with respect to material consumption, pollution, waste generation, or energy consumption is the quantity or inventory for a specified period of time. Micro- level inventory may be measured with respect to a geographical area or industrial facility. Sources for macrolevel inventory data for the United States are summarized in Table 2.

Metrics may also be indexed with respect to a manufacturing output, input, throughput, or batch size, as discussed in Allen and Rosselot (1997). Product-based environmental impact analysis requires activity-based inventory assessment (Stuart et al. 1998). Similar to activity-based costing (see Chapter 89), activity-based environmental inventory assessment recognizes the hierarchy of impacts and as- signs them proportionately to an activity such as a product or service.

Due to the complexity of environmental impacts, the Swedish Environmental Institute and Volvo recommend consideration of the following characteristics in their environmental priority strategies (EPS) system: scope, extent of distribution, frequency and intensity, duration or permanence, signif- icance of contribution, and remediability (Horkeby 1997; Ryding et al. 1993). Another complexity to consider is the transfer of impacts along the supply chain because materials extraction, assembly, use, reuse, recycling, and disposal may occur in different locations around the world.

Legal Requirements

Traditional command-and-control requirements that primarily targeted the manufacturing phase of the product life cycle increased significantly in the past 20 years in the United States. For example, the number of environmental laws passed in the United States increased from 7 between 1895 and 1955 to 40 between 1955 and 1995 (Allenby 1999). Similarly, the number of environmental agree- ments in the European Union has generally escalated from 1982 to 1995, as described in European Environmental Agency (1997). Many of the regulations in the Asia-Pacific region mirror those in the United States and Europe (Bateman 1999a,b).

Manufacturers must also follow local legislation such as mandates for permits to install or operate processes with regulated effluents. In addition to local and federal mandates where manufacturing and sales take place, manufacturers must also keep abreast of global agreements. For example, the manufacture of chlorofluorocarbon (CFC) solvents, which were used for cleaning electronic assem- blies, was banned in 1995 (Andersen 1990). Environmental law is discussed in Chapter 19. Additional legal and service trends are discussed in the next section.

Responsibility Trends

This section outlines three emerging trends that directly affect the manufacturer’s responsibility for environmental impacts: extended product responsibility, extended services, and environmental infor- mation reporting. The first trend calls for producers to prevent pollution associated with their products over the products’ life cycles. For the second trend, rather than solely selling products, some man- ufacturers are expanding their business to offer service packages that include the use of their products. In the third trend, the availability and mandatory reporting requirements for environmental infor- mation for customers are increasing. These trends are discussed in the next three subsections.

Extended Product Responsibility

There is a trend in Europe and East Asia toward product life cycle responsibility legislation that requires manufacturers to minimize environmental impacts from materials extraction to manufacturing to distribution / packaging to repair to recycling to disposal. Essentially, extended product responsi- bility shifts the pollution prevention focus from production facilities to the entire product life cycle (Davis et al. 1997). For example, proposed legislation may require that manufacturers not only recycle in-plant wastes but also recycle their discarded products (Denmark Ministry of the Environment 1992; Davis 1997). The evaluation of life cycle stages and impacts are discussed further in Section 4.3.

Manufacturers as Service Providers

In recent years, as manufacturers have assumed the additional role of service provider, responsibility for environmental impact has shifted from the user to the manufacturer. For example, a chemical supplier may be reimbursed per total auto bodies cleaned rather than for the procurement of chemicals for auto body cleaning. Under such an arrangement, there is a financial incentive for the supplier to reduce material consumption (Johnson et al. 1997). In another example, an electronic component manufacturer may use a chemical rental program. The supplier provides chemical management from purchasing and inventory management to waste treatment and disposal (Johnson et al. 1997). Thus, chemical suppliers are gaining a broader responsibility for their products throughout their products’ life cycles.

Another important service trend is the replacement of products with services. For example, tele- communications providers offer voice mail rather than selling answering machines. Another example is electronic order processing rather than paper processing. These service trends result in demater- ialization, the minimization of materials consumed to accomplish goals (Herman et al. 1989).

Environmental Information Provided by Manufacturers

The third trend is the increasing amount of environmental information that manufacturers com- municate to customers. Three general approaches for communicating environmental attributes to corporate procurement and consumers have emerged: eco-labels, self-declaration, and life cycle assessment.

Eco-labels are the simplest format for consumers but the most inflexible format for manufacturers in that they require that 100% of their standard criteria be met. Examples of eco-labels include the Energy Star label in the United States and the Blue Angel in Germany. Because over 20 different eco-labels with different criteria are in use around the world, manufacturers may need to consider multiple eco-label criteria sets (Modl 1995).

Another type of label, self-declaration, allows producers to select methods and metrics. However, comparisons among competing products or services are difficult. Self-declaration is the most flexible form for manufacturers, but its use depends on the manufacturer’s environmental reputation among customers. The ECMA, a European industry association that proposes standards for information and communication systems, has proposed product-related environmental attribute standards (Granda et al. 1998).

Full life-cycle assessment, a comprehensive method to analyze the environmental attributes of the entire life cycle of a product, requires environmental engineering expertise. Life cycle assessment is described in Section 4.3.

Consumers may learn about environmental impacts from eco-labels, self-declaration, and life cycle assessment studies. Industrial engineers may learn about clean manufacturing as universities integrate industrial ecology concepts into business and engineering programs (Santi 1997; Stuart 2000). Im- portant clean manufacturing concepts are defined in the next section.