Growing green plants

There are measures that every plant professional can take to help industry avoid accusations of being a terrible blight on the landscape we must share with the rest of humanity. Executive Editor Russ Kratowicz recommends these Web resources.

By Russ Kratowicz

PlantServices.com

Kermit had it right in 1972 when he sang “It's Not Easy Being Green.” And he wasn’t even in the industrial arena. It matters not a whit whether you believe in human-induced global warming; we appear to be facing a continuing prospect of monster hurricanes and other unpleasant environmental phenomena. Fortunately, there are measures that every plant professional can take to help industry avoid accusations of being a terrible blight on the landscape we must share with the rest of humanity.

This month, I thought I’d take you for a slide into that digital morass we call the Web to uncover some practical, zero-cost, noncommercial, registration-free resources that should broaden your environmental horizons. Remember, we search the Web so you don't have to.

Why you should care

Instead of running away from the threat of regulatory sanctions, forward-thinking plant professionals should be running toward a strategy for bottom-line improvement that rests on three ideas: economic prosperity, environmental stewardship and social responsibility.

“Why Facility Managers Need To Care About Sustainability,” an article by Paul von Paumgartten in the August 2004 issue of Today's Facility Manager magazine, highlights the pressures that bear on business and the sustainable measures that you can adopt to perform better in each arena. Access this bit of wisdom by going to www.todaysfacilitymanager.com, clicking on “Articles by Issue” and scrolling down to “August 2004.”

Overview

“Green Manufacturing Is a Strategic Priority,” an article published in the September 15, 2000, issue of Manufacturing & Technology News, gives an overview of a concept called environmentally benign manufacturing. The article argues that social responsibility in the form of environmentally–neutral manufacturing practices can be an effective tool for increasing a company’s market share. Also, the idea that ever more strict ecolaws will hamper your ability to prosper is deflated by an anecdote about Sony and Siemens. Be sure to note the change in attitude cited by Timothy Gutowski, chairman of the World Technology Evaluation Center (WTEC) workshop for Environmentally Benign Manufacturing. He started as a skeptic and became a true believer after reading the research that says American manufacturing plants had better become heavily involved in emission reduction. You might not buy his story, but if you do nothing else with this Web page, scroll to the bottom for the six bullet points that should be a wakeup for plant professionals. Go to www.manufacturingnews.com/news/00/0915/art1.html, then read it and weep.

The balancing tradeoff

Conforming to environmental regulations that benefit society at large and maximizing business profitability aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive activities. From the point of view of the economist, achieving a win-win balance under the constraints of a particular statute is certainly possible, but it’s not necessarily easy and not universally applicable to every player in the marketplace. To explore the relationship between greenbacks and being green, Stanford's Alliance for Innovative Manufacturing, MIT's Leaders for Manufacturing Program and the University of Michigan's Tauber Manufacturing Institute participated in a 2003 symposium titled "The Business Case for Sustainable Manufacturing." Greg Gonzales wrote a column that highlights some of the presentations. If you want to know more about the realities of the cost-versus-benefit seesaw, then pop over to http://google.stanford.edu/ and enter “green business practices” in the search window. When the results appear, open the file named “Symposium makes a case for 'green' business practices.”

A skeptic’s net loss

The sum of all the energy and matter you’ll find in the known universe is fixed. You can shuffle energy from one form to another and reversibly exchange matter and energy, but the total in your giant test tube isn’t going to change. That’s the first law of thermodynamics.

Furthermore, if no extraneous energy crosses your system boundaries, the energy content of your final state will be less than the energy content of your initial state. That’s the second law of thermodynamics. That old Harpie, Mother Nature, insists on this being true for everyone.

When you hear of a so-called breakthrough technology that reverses the environmental damage we’re inflicting on this third rock from the sun, display a degree of skepticism appropriate for the professional you are. Mother Nature isn’t going to allow anyone to violate her laws. An example of what I’m talking about is the idea of making plastics from corn. It sounds like a good idea, but Tillman Gerngross, assistant professor of biochemical engineering at Dartmouth College, points out that when you take into consideration a detailed accounting of the energy required to produce a unit of PHA-based plastic, using corn as a feedstock doesn’t help the environment one iota. Rather than cite a long, complex URL, I’d suggest you flit over to www.dartmouth.edu and enter the phrase “how green is green” in the search box. This brings up an article titled “How ‘green’ is ‘green’ manufacturing,” which is based on a paper Gerngross delivered at a meeting of the American Chemical Society in 1999.

From Down Under

Research for this column uncovered a Web site that’s dedicated to transforming everything we know and love into a sustainable global society and economy. Its content is primarily of a philosophical nature more than it is a cookbook approach to developing ecological, social and economic sustainability. The site, the product of Green Innovations, a non-profit Australian environmental think-tank and services organization, takes the big-picture approach to what individuals, companies and states ought to be doing to ensure that your grandchildren will be able to live an acceptable lifestyle. Unfortunately, achieving the noble goals being promoted here requires us to scale back our consumption to the adequate level, which is well below our desired level and current standard of living. What’s not clear, though, is who will be in charge of determining the extent to which we must deny ourselves those pleasures we now take for granted. Anyway, if you’re interested, drop in at www.green-innovations.asn.au/ [hyphens after green] for rather text-heavy exploration of the organization’s philosophy. The major takeaway is the link to “Great Transition,” a 111-page online book about the organization’s approach to sustainability.