See text links
below.
By Kevin Munn
A second, more numerous category of VIs is that of bilateral agreements, taking the form of a signed formal document between, typically, industry (an enterprise, plant, or trade association) and government (frequently the ministry or agency responsible for environmental issues). These VIs are also analysed in this study. Those presented in detail are the pollution-emission reduction agreements in the United States, Canada and Netherlands. In the United States a VI also exists for occupational health and safety performance. This was the only VI uncovered (apart from Responsible Care) which encompassed safety and health issues; most of these schemes are oriented towards environmental issues.
Environmental management systems comprise a third category of VIs. The most significant examples today for the chemical industry are the British Standard 7750 (BS 7750), the Environmental Management and Eco-Auditing Scheme of the European Union (EMAS) and the ISO's ISO 14000 series of standards.
The international VIs detail characteristics of environmental management systems (EMS), whereas the national ones are mainly concerned with the amounts of pollutants which enter the environment and how these are reduced over a several-year period. The former, then, tend to focus on enterprises' procedures and practices in respect of environmental management; the latter are almost solely concerned with environmental performance.
In the US, for example, there was a growing body of legislation for at least 20 years prior to CMA's Responsible Care programme (and 15 years prior to the birth of Responsible Care in Canada). In 1969, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) defined national policy as being to use "all practical means and measures" to ensure that "man and nature can exist in productive harmony". This laid the groundwork for environmental legislation on sound waste disposal and clean air (1970), clean water and marine protection (1972), endangered species (1973) and control of toxic substances (1976).4
In the early 1980s the chemical industry came under continuing pressure from an increasingly sceptical public as a result of such widely publicized occurrences as Love Canal and Lekkerkerk (Netherlands). The Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), or "Superfund", was enacted in 1980, and gave the US EPA the authority and the resources to prevent the release of hazardous waste into the air and water, to clean up old waste disposal sites and to collect the costs for such cleanup from the polluting firms. Superfund was originally authorized for five years and was funded (with $1.5 billion for the period 1980-85) through a feedstock tax on chemical producers.
The momentum and implications of these events were not lost on the leadership of the chemical industry. In his speech as departing chairman of CMA in June 1983, Bill Simeral called upon the industry to attend to the battered image of the chemical industry, and to do it by looking at the industry from the public's perspective. Simeral saw the mounting negative publicity on the industry as dangerous to the industry. He cited examples of the steel industry and how it lost public support when it chose to litigate rather than focus on pollution control, and how the automobile industry lost public confidence when it failed to acknowledge the need for more fuel-efficient cars.5
The period which followed brought developments which were shocking to both the public and the chemical industry. Under Superfund, the magnitude of the legacy of industrial pollution was coming to light for the first time -- by 1990 some 26,000 hazardous waste sites would be identified in the US. The reauthorization of Superfund was going ahead, and the budget for the programme would eventually be increased almost sixfold (to $8.5 billion for five years). CMA Chairman Louis Fernandez, fearing "punitive" legislation if the industry resisted the legislation as it had in 1979, offered to join hands with the Government. The position of the industry was clear; reauthorize Superfund, but make it more workable.6
As these debates went on in Washington, a tragedy which stunned the industry and the world occurred in Bhopal, India, on 4 December 1984. Three thousand local residents died when a Union Carbide plant leaked MIC (a highly toxic cyanide compound) at its facility there. The impact of Bhopal on the attitude of the industry towards itself may have been even greater than the impact on the public's attitude towards the industry. After all, the public already had the attitude that the chemical industry was polluting, irresponsible and unconcerned. But to the industry, Union Carbide was a respected member of its ranks -- if it could happen to UC, it could happen to anybody.
In part because of Bhopal, reauthorization of Superfund in 1986 contained a section known as the Community Right-to-Know Act (Title III), which greatly expanded the public's role in shaping environmental policy. First, all US plants which annually manufactured, processed or used more than 75,000 pounds (34,000 kg) of any of 300 listed chemicals were required to submit detailed reports on all their environmental emissions (this threshold was reduced to 25,000 pounds in 1990). Second, industrial users of hazardous chemicals were required to report typical inventories of hazardous materials and work with state and local officials to prepare comprehensive plans for emergency situations.
Title III was not completely unfriendly to the industry. In fact much of the text for Title III came directly from CMA, which after Bhopal had surveyed its members and found that, while the large majority had emergency response procedures in place for events within their facilities, almost none had provisions for coordination with local fire and police departments. CMA's answer was to initiate the community awareness and emergency response (CAER) programme. The proactive approach which CMA had taken paid off, as whole sections of CAER text were incorporated almost verbatim into Title III.
Whether viewed as inimical or not, Title III radically changed the landscape with respect to industrial environmental activities and compliance. No longer was the reporting of polluting effluents transmitted only to a burdened and relatively removed government agency. Local individuals and community groups could now leapfrog the entire legislative development and implementation process. Of course, these persons and groups had no direct power of enforcement, but the power of public opinion was at this stage well-demonstrated, and few of those actors approaching their local industries were likely to be satisfied with a firm's uncorroborated assurances. The US chemical industry here entered an era where its operations would be open to an unprecedented level of scrutiny. No longer would environmental performance be measured solely by factors like "tons of pollutant X emitted per annum" or "workdays lost to injury per X hours worked"; it would now also include such difficult-to-define factors as public relations, emergency preparedness and corporate commitment.
While the US chemical industry was waking up to the magnitude of this required transformation, the Canadians had also recognized a need for revisiting the roles and responsibilities of the chemical industry in society. The CCPA saw the need for improvements in performance and the industry's public image, and saw the CMA's CAER programme as an attractive model. But while the CCPA embraced the framework of principles and management practices from CAER, it wanted a programme that would encompass essentially all the activities of the chemical industry. In 1986, it coined the term "Responsible Care", and took it as the umbrella programme for the environmentally sound management of the industry's R&D, transportation, distribution, manufacturing and hazardous waste activities.
CCPA's efforts gave birth to the Responsible Care programme, essentially as we know it today. The hallmarks of Responsible Care were laid out in the structure of the programme, which includes guiding principles and codes of practice (explained later), and most significantly required: "The most senior executive responsible for chemical operations in each member company of the CCPA has formally accepted these principles and endorsement as a condition of membership".
Since the CCPA's founding work in 1984 (and their formal adoption of the programme in 1986), 40 national chemical associations have adopted Responsible Care. These include all those in countries which are considered technologically most advanced, as well as a number in Asia, Africa and South America. The majority of the adherent associations, and the major efforts in developing the programme both nationally and internationally, are still in North America and Europe. Australia has also developed an advanced Responsible Care programme.
Responsible Care continues to evolve, with the most significant developments since its inception being the inclusion of product stewardship, which expands a company's voluntary responsibilities for its products from cradle-to-grave, and the more recent, much awaited, and closely watched verification efforts aimed at demonstrating credible progress to a hopeful yet sceptical audience.
Fundamental features. The chemical industry at the international level has listed the following elements as "fundamental features" of Responsible Care:
1. a formal commitment to a set of guiding principles on behalf of each company;
2. a series of codes, guidance notes and checklists to assist companies to implement the commitment;
3. the progressive development of indicators against which improvements and performance can be measured;
4. an ongoing process of communications on ESH matters with interested parties outside the industry;
5. provision of fora in which companies can share views and exchange experiences on implementation of the commitment;
6. adoption of a title or logo which clearly identify national programmes as being consistent with and part of the concept of Responsible Care; and
7. consideration of how best to encourage all associate members companies to commit and participate in Responsible Care.
4 G.C. Lodge and J.F. Rayport, Responsible Care, Harvard Business School (Report No. 9-391-135), 1991.
5 op. cit.
6 op. cit.
