Pollution Prevention and Profits

Ashok Khosla

Environmental thinking has progressed a long way during the past twenty years.The frequency
of UN conferences, expert seminars, books, newspaper articles, TV programmes testify to this.
They are both the cause of growing and widespread concern among the public, and the result of
it.
Yet, there still exist people whose modes of thought are mired in the pre-Stockholm era. What is
frightening is that the number is not small, and many are in positions of considerable influence.
We regularly meet captains of industry and senior officials of government who, with a smug shrug
of their shoulders, continue to believe that pollution is the price we have to pay for “progress”.
Pollution and waste, deforestation and soil erosion, floods and drought.
The price gets higher by the day, and the value of the benefits gets lower. And the pace of
industrialisation continues to accelerate. Of course, past pricing structures made some resources
such as air and water almost free; and others like energy far too cheap. The full costs of
industrial activity to society and environment never had to be included in the feasibility
calculations. And information on these issues is, even now, skimpy and unreliable.
But even with present prices and information, we could have expected better performance by the
industry. After all, they themselves stand to benefit as much as anyone else. Pollution and waste
are simply resources in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some enlightened industries found
out a long time ago (in this business fifteen years is a long time) that pollution prevention actually
pays. The concept was quite successful in a whole range of industries, and acquired its own
name: PPP (not to be confused with the other PPP, the “polluter pays principle”).
Pollution can be prevented by many different types of measures. The best known are those that
rely on treating or cleaning up the pollution and wastes produced by a factory or power plant.
These are known in the trade as “end-of-pipe” solutions, capable of providing visible evidence of
action taken by the enterprise, though this may not necessarily be good economics or improve
the environment.
The easiest, quickest and least expensive method is simply good house-keeping: to close the
leaks and tighten the valves so that the production equipment performs as designed. Effective
resource management can contribute considerably to savings, and therefore the profits, of the
enterprise. Source reduction, involving some technology improvements as well, has been
embraced by many businesses as one of the best investments they can make.
Further gains, both in terms of pollution reduction and improved profitability, can be had by
introducing substantial changes in the production technology and the raw material mix.
Unfortunately, Third World industry has limited capability for developing such technologies, and
even more limited access to the latest equipment from suppliers who are only too willing to supply
unwanted, out-of-date equipment. So, industrialists, in large numbers, and with the implicit
approval of the authorities, continue to pollute away in the name of national development.
One way out of this impasse is offered by the techniques of “Cleaner Production” and “Lifecycle
Analysis”. These methods do not go so far as to raise the kinds of fundamental questions on
consumption patterns and lifestyles often addressed in these columns. However, they do
examine closely the basic production systems and attempt to identify those sensitive points at
which significant gains can be had for resource conservation.
Third World industry does not yet have a massive investment in industrial plants. At present
industrial growth rates, the bulk of industrial capacity in developing countries during the next two
decades will be new. This gives us considerable advantage, provided we are able to negotiate
indigenous development or foreign import of the right types of technology.