'Don't trust us, track us" is a noble sentiment. But how do you shadows chemical operations and judge whether Responsible Care is more than a public relations exercise? Obviously, getting a measuring system in place is implicit in the prospects for the success of Responsible Care.
Lack of progress in developing measures has triggered a race on both sides of the Atlantic between industry and environmentalists to get systems in place. For the moment, while industry has promising programs under study, such as linkage to ISO 9000, environmental groups have the initiative with a variety of schemes.
A report assessing the environmental performance of the world's top 50 chemical earners is being compiled by the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA; Hamburg). Drawn up from the companies' answers to 25 questions, which are designed to find out how environmentally sustainable (and independently verified) their operations are, the report will be published in the next six months.
TACITURN. Douglas Mulhall, managing director of EPEA, remains tight-lipped about how companies rate--other than saying that some with traditionally clean images are big polluters and vice versa. He stresses that benchmarking is important, as all companies need to be compare. "Responsible Care does not do this," he contends.
In the U.S. a coalition of environmental groups called Communities Concerned about Carbide is organizing to get more and better information from Union Carbide plants that communities, with the help of outside experts, can use to track the environmental performance of the plants. At present the group has focused its attention on the company's Seadrift, TX petrochemicals plant, but the model being developed there is intended to be widespread.
"We are trying to develop a group of technical experts who would be working for communities around the various chemical facilities--who would provide those resources when they are needed by a community," says …
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