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Environmentally Profitable 91

Posted by michael from the rolling-in-the-green dept.
lemmingEffect writes: "Came across this NYT article about how many companies are finding unexpected cost-savings for using more environmentally-friendly manufacturing processes and materials. Kinda like getting paid to clean your room--sure would have made me happier as a kid. =)"
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Environmentally Profitable More

Environmentally Profitable

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  • Well, duh (Score:4, Insightful)

    by YIAAL ( 129110 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @08:14AM (#2270437) Homepage
    As long as you don't go beyond what technology can reasonably accomplish, environmentally friendly processes are usually going to be more efficient. And more efficient processes are usually going to be cheaper, at least over the long term.

    The problem is when you try to get too far ahead of existing technology. Then you wind up with kludged-together stuff that doesn't work right. A good example is the too-early adoption of electronic engine controls by Detroit in the 1970s. In principle, it was a great idea. In practice, the technology wasn't robust enough yet, and U.S. cars suffered reliability problems for years as a result.

    (They're still behind Japanese and German cars, but not by much -- in fact, a crappy Chevy today is considerably more reliable than the "bulletproof" Toyotas of the late '80s.)

    • Re:Well, duh (Score:4, Informative)

      by mrseth ( 69273 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @11:42AM (#2270736) Homepage
      I was a GM dealership automotive technician for many years and I worked my way through college in an independent garage for 4 years. I can tell you that the problems with cars manufacutered by the Big Three had nothing to do with technology and everything due to the fact that the bean counters seemed to be in control of the engineering department. The Japanese imports had to conform to the same emissions standards as their American counterparts yet suffered none of the reliability problems. For instance, the materials used in the American cars were absolutely inferior. After about 2-3 years the old barrel-type coolant sensor connector on a GM car would crumble in your hands. My wife's 1988 Celica's coolant sensor connector, and for that matter the vacuum hoses, radiator hoses, and many other platic parts that are subject to strain and engine heat are still original equipment and in seemingly good condition after 188,000 Mi. The American counterparts would all tend to be brittle and/or broken at this age and mileage. Another example is gasket design and material. The Japanese had gone to rubber/neoprene type gaskets for things like valve/cam covers where the US cars were still using cheap cork or RTV compound. For that matter the Japanese cam covers (of course the Japs had OHC engines that were also much more advanced than the rewarmed 1950's and 1960's OHV relics that GM was using) themselves were molded aluminum as opposed to the cheap American stamped steel valve covers that would bend as you tried to pry loose the leaking RTV (Actually, I got really good at sealing these things, but it is an art). These problems also were present in the fuel systems, the electronics, the ignition systems, etc. So really this has nothing to do with technology and everything to do with underengineering and putting profit above product quality.

  • Yep (Score:1, Insightful)

    by squaretorus ( 459130 )
    The reason for this is simple - usage of anything is environmentally damaging to some degree. By reducing waste we reduce environmental damage. Once these big gains run out, and we are faced with the hard decisions about cutting usage, not just wasteful usage, it will actually start costing money to be more environmentally protective.

    Its a bit like the UK record on CO2 emmissions - by closing all the coal fired power stations we cut billions of tonnes of CO2 emmissions. But our energy usage continues to rise - to cut further we need to cut usage - MUCH harder than simply switching fuels. Sending the HP toner carts back is one thing - using less of them quite another.

    The world is not saved because a few corps stop throwing out all the half full cans of solvent at the end of each day. We're dooomed! we're all dooomed.
    • but trying to damage the environment is like trying to put a hole in the ocean. Sure, the air might get a bit warmer and people and animals alike might feel a little bit uncomfortable for a while, but freaky changes in climate and the food chain have happened many times in the past without "destroying the planet." Or even noticeably damaging it.

      The rhetoric of environmentalism, as you said, always seems to be to cut out more and more of the frills like electricity, treated water, flushable toilets, all of which seem to make sense when you explain them the right way, but which in the end only serve to deterorate our quality of life.

      And we take it in the bum every time :)

      This article correctly points out that some new techniques that nobody would have thought up, had greenies not stepped in and started picketing and lobbying, would save money after all. I think its safer to call them Alternative, however.
      • Pretty much no matter what we do to the earth, we're not going to wipe out all forms of life on earth, as you said. We can't 'destroy' the planet.
        However, it's theoretically possible that some types of environmental damage could seriously affect our human quality of life.

        We could wipe out the ozone layer, and animals would evolve to be more resistant to UV radiation. Some probably wouldnt be able to, and some would, but in the end we're not wiping out all forms of life on earth. But, I'd rather not have to take a bath in SPF 5000 every time I leave the house. Or only be able to go out at night. Sure, we could do it, but it would suck.

        Same thing with global warming. If, (and it's a big if, I know. But bear with me here)... If we are causing the planet to warm up noticably, there would likely be some changes. THe land currently used for farmland might be turned to desert, for example. Sure, land that was previously frozen further north would now be a decent temperature for farmland. But it would seriously affect the quality of life for millions (billions?) or people.

        As for new technologies and more efficiency being the answer... it's the answer for some problems, but not all.

        -J5K

  • Scratching the Surface (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    This is a good step in the right direction, the maximizing of profit at all other costs is terrible. Still we have a long way to go, in my local community a battery plant is run with a bare minimum staff so that the EPA will not do a massive inspection after the plant closes. They moved operations to mexico and decided it was cheaper to keep the plant open with a skeleton crew than to do the cleanup costs involved :-(

    "Contact with my own species has always disappointed me. Solitude gives me a freedom of mind and an independence of action." -Captain Nemo
  • Link that doesn't need an account, etc, etc. [nytimes.com]

    WTF is with this "Lameness filter encountered.? It disappeared as soon as i put this text below the link...
  • Do you know why steel is outlasting aluminum in cars and even regaining ground?

    Steel is more environmentally friendly to produce! Just ask the folks behind the Ultra-Light Steel Auto Body project. Steel releases a lot less CO2 during its manufacture than aluminum. Once again, established big industry maintains its edge over new fangled competitors.

    Because a desktop machine is not well-suited for producing the entire side of a car in a single stamping operation from steel sheet and repeating that 300 times an hour. Big, messy industrial processes replaced cottage industries for a reason: they're cheaper in the long run.

    As desktop manufacturing gets cheaper, so do the big industrial processes. A desktop machine that can produce some make believe "diamondoid" economically can also produce a lot more steel even more economically and easily! Operating temperatures are lower, formability requirements are lower, ability to rework the steel product is higher, etc. And since steel does the job just fine, why switch over to a more expensive, troublesome, low production rate material like diamondoid?
    • Aluminum weighs 35 to 40% less than steel, when manufactured to the same strength requirement.

      Steel endures much more flex without failure, whereas aluminum reaches its flexibility endurance limit faster. The failure mode of aluminum (bend some and break and absorb energy) is actually safer in the realm of automobile construction.

      Aluminum space frames can be manufactured in a single piece, which makes prediction of their real-world behavior much easier to predict through computational models, requiring less physical testing.

      Aluminum's lower weight makes it cheaper to transport throughout all phases of automobile manufacture.

      If and as the cost per pound can come down enough that the benefits outweigh the costs, or the benefits become more important, we can expect aluminum to have a stronger presence in automotive manufacture.

      recently, aluminum has gained ground in niche automotive products like pickup truck tailgates, hood assemblies, engine blocks (with GM introducing their first aluminum block truck engine in 2002)... areas where consumers can see the direct benefits.

      I'm not an aluminum grandstander by any means. I just think the "steel is cheaper" argument is way too simple... it's really just a matter of time.
  • Does this mean that Bush is going to sign the Kyotto deals? Now he can profit from cleaning up!

  • Well... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Sarcasmooo! ( 267601 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @08:31AM (#2270455)
    Too bad that, in most cases, companies don't clean themselves up; they convince local government to establish c [corporations.org] o [progress.org] r [cei.org] p [time.com] o [fieldofschemes.com] r [globalexchange.org] a [citizen.org] t [autobuyology.org] e [corpwatch.org] 'wealthfare' [issues2000.org] programs that force the public's tax money to foot the bill for whatever maintenance and equipment is needed to reach standards set by environmental regulations.

    • Re:Well... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by Sagarian ( 519668 )
      While I don't aim to excuse the behavior of corporations using public money to foot the bill, the bottom line is that someone has to foot it.

      You can pay for it through higher product prices or higher taxes. While it would be more economically efficient to have consumers foot the bill for the resources consumed and wasted by the products they purchase, at least the environmental efficiences claimed by this NYT article are in fact being realized. And once realized to be profitable, such practices are more likely to be adopted.

      The ultimate reality, in my mind, is that many environmental regulations are passed without regard to their economic impact (would you pay 10x the cost for water with 5x lest arsenic in it, when current levels are KNOWN to be safe?).

      Thus, I believe it requires public and private cooperation to realize efficient ways to comply with environmental regulations.

      Perhaps the best way would be to treat compliance expenses as research projects in cases where affordable methods are not known for compliance, in which the results (such as the practices mentioned in the NYT article) would be 'open source' published as best practices for compliance, and then future funds cut accordingly as the cost uncertainty is eliminated.

      It might help to view this as a choice between funneling public funds to develop best practices which are viable or even profitable, versus hiring a bunch of regulators to monitor compliance (and how the heck do you set a fine when the costs of compliance are not well understood? This invites further gaming inefficienies).

      Either requires public money. I for one am willing to invest my tax dollars to helping companies develop efficient compliance mechanisms, as long as those results are open-sourced.
      • Well, I'd be concerned as to whether or not they were safe, unfortunately. Check out "Toxic Sludge is Good For You" -- evidently, the industries involved have started to change the definitions so as to favor themselves.
    • As an engineer who has had to help numerous companies "clean themselves up," I can tell you that the above statement is crap. While I don't doubt that SOME companies may manage to get the local gov't to help with environmental costs, MOST companies certainly do not.

      The above poster is taking the activities of a few crafty and politically savvy companies and trying to claim that such things are the norm.
      I am certainly against politicians handing out "corprate welfare" to their corprate allies (like Al Gore and Occidental Petrolium, for example*) but lets not exaggerate the problem (even though that tactic has worked SO well for the environmental extremists) and claim that the majority of all companies are guilty of recieving such "welfare."

      *What you thought Bush and the Republicans were the only people with ties to big oil companies?

  • What people ought to realize... (Score:4, Insightful)

    by rneches ( 160120 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @09:40AM (#2270539) Homepage
    Pollution is waste. Waste is inefficency. Inefficency is lost profit. Ergo, it is cheaper to be cleaner. This applies to everything from engines to PCB manufacturing.

    In the late 60's and early 70's, the auto industry tried to prevent or forstall the imposition of pollution controlls by insisting that cleaner engines would be less efficent, and that it would be impossible to actually improve their engine technology. The same year that GM and Ford vehigles took a huge penalty in gas milage and performace because the companies were forced to install catalytic converters, Honda introduced a car that met the pollution restrictions without a converter and with excellent gas mileage and reasonable performace for its displacement. But despite the facts, the result of this public relations temper-tantrum is that ever since, enviornmentalism has been linked with sacrifices in prosperity. This is evident in Bush's energy plan, and the US reluctance to cut CO2 emissions.

    It has everything to do with corporate (and occasionally individual) resentment at being told what to do. It has nothing to do with the realities of the industries in question. The association of concervation with decreased prosperity is classic FUD.

    It's really sad that this realization is news, but I'm glad a few people are finally waking up to it.

    • Yeah, I can't understand why everyone obsesses over "productivity" (more production from the same or less work input) and not over resource efficiency (more production from the same or less resource inputs). Resource inputs includes everything from the inefficient lights in your factory burning 24 hours a day, to the quantities of unused material (and thus unrealized economic return) that pours out as "waste".
    • Pollution is waste. Waste is inefficency. Inefficency is lost profit. Ergo, it is cheaper to be cleaner.

      Sometimes waste is just waste.

      For instance mining, I want the silver and it might turn out to be cheaper to scoop out the ore, remove the silver and dump the rest of the dirt back in the ground.

      Or how about processed corn? I buy lots of corn on the cob, do my thing, and end up with bags of corn and lots of cob. What do I do with the cobs? Perhaps they make a good fuel, or can be ground up for animal feed, or maybe I can press them together to make building material. Who knows? But whatever I want to do with them, the public has to be willing to pay me more than the cost to process them - the cost of throwing the away. If I would take a lesser hit by throwing away the cobs then that's what makes good economic sense for me.

      Looking at nature, there are lots of niche markets. Plants can store chemical energy efficiently so long as they don't expend too much energy in daily life. Animals by contrast show that for a highly mobile lifestyle it's more efficent to discard lots of waste that is too energy costly to reprocess compared with the abundance of food their mobility gives them access to. By contrast algae, fungus, etc breakdown that waste because they aren't mobile enough to find better resaources for them. Of course some organisms do things the way they do because they've never evolved a better method, but natural selection suggests that their place in nature will be close to the most efficient they can be with what they've got.

      Technology makes new uses for things and makes reclaiming raw materials more cost effective, but it doesn't make sense for the producer until it is cost effective. If we don't like pollution then one solution is to charge the polluters for dumping stuff into the environment, because then their costs for disposal may exceed the costs of reclaimation or alternative use. Or we might subsidize other solutions so they become less costly than dumping.

      Efficiency can be equivalent to cost effective, but it doesn't have to be in all processes and markets.

      • Re:What people ought to realize... (Score:4, Insightful)

        by FFFish ( 7567 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @02:15PM (#2271052) Homepage
        Keeping in mind, of course, that there are short-term cost efficiencies, and long-term cost efficiencies.

        Throwing away your corn cobs may be short-term cost effective. In the long term, though (and especially if you're a big corn-cobbing industry) it's going to become costly as landfills become glutted, transport costs rise, etc.

        Installing a power plant that runs on cob fuel might be short-term expensive, but perhaps over the long term it would pay for itself several times over.

        Short-term pain for long-term gain? Long-term pain for short-term gain?

        It's a balancing act. Pros and cons on every issue.

        That all expounded on, I'll conclude with my opinion: in the past, and particularly in the recent past, the emphasis has been on very-short-term gain.

        Executives are being paid extravagantly for short-term performance, and are thus making the most immediately-profitable, shortest-term, biggest-payback decisions.

        This needs to change. Instead of paying them ten million dollars in bonuses for their performance in the immediate past year, delay it until they've proven for a decade or two that their earlier decisions were the best decisions.

        We'll end up with financially healthy companies that have high-quality long-term planning, that don't take the easy way out because it's cheapest *right now*, and that will provide jobs for the next generation.

        Plus, my portfolio will probably be happier. :)

      • The key thing (with either corn or silver) is that there are end products in the process that have a consistent quality.

        Anytime you're generating a large mass of something (like corn cobs) that has a consistent quality to them, there is potential to use it for something else.

        If you take this potential raw material, and just throw it in the ground (or burn it), you're wasting the energy used to refine it. Sure, that energy was earmarked for refining the pricipal product (corn or silver), but as a result of that process you have also refined another potential product (corn cobs, or whatever is left of the silver ore). It usually just takes a little cleverness and effort to put this other raw material to good use too.

    • In the late 60's and early 70's, the auto industry...[insisted]...that it would be impossible to actually improve their engine technology.

      I think a large part of this attitude rests with the stockholders that are unwilling to support R&D that may take years to pay off. How the hell can a company improve its produts when the stockholders (through the board and the officers) demand that the company be bled dry just to have a bigger dividend next quarter?

      Yes, I know that not all stockholders are so shortsighted, and that it's no secret that a company must spend at least some money on R&D just to be competitive. The actual truth is probably some gray area.

      A good part of the problem is those STUPID stockholders that have no business tying their own shoes, let alone influencing our economy, livelihoods, market, and environment. I think we have all seen what kind of turmoil these stupid people have created over the last few years. Putting such insane funding into those crazy ventures was not only a waste of resources, but it makes life difficult for the "honest" ventures.
      • Speaking as a stockholder in several companies I think you way overestimate the power the individual stockholder has. Company management with it's golden parachutes and employment contracts, have made themselves invulnerable to all but the most severe stockholder rebellions. These CEO's and Presidents are extremely overpaid and have no need or inclination to answer to anyone except their BOD's (and even then they like as not utterly control them) or LARGE institutional stockholders. If these are the stockholders you mention, then there is some truth to your statement. Everything is set up these days around that quarterly earnings report so you can impress some 25 year old stock analyst in NYC. So he can then hype your company, increasing your stock price and making your CEO stock options enormously valuable. It's sickening. The only large corporate CEO that understands that his future depends on the company future is GE's CEO Welch. If GE has a bad year, he gives back his salary!! Most CEO's still keep their salary and a nice bonus.

  • The key factor that everyone misses is that we obtain our resources from the environment. The amount of resources on the planet will never get larger, but the amount of people will always increase. This means less resources per person as the population increases. To add to this problem, when people waste resources by throwing them into landfills, etc, this decreases the amount of resources per person even more.

    Supposedly the basic law of economics will save us from running out of resources. The less resources there are to spread around, the more expensive they will be. The price will get exponentially great, like a y=1/x curve. Eventually this will get to a point where only the rich can have basic resources.

    So, our economy needs to become more efficient, reusing resources in order to keep from falling into this future problem.

    Has anyone read the book Red Mars? [amazon.com] I like this book as it shows a good example of what happens to an economy with no respect for the enviroment and it's limited resources.

    • I disagree.

      First off, who says the amount of people will always increase? Many industrialized nations have seen great dorps in population growth. Some places have even fallen so far that the birth rate doesn't match the death rate and thus they are actually shrinking. (IIRC, Italy was the leading example of this) All environments produce limits on what a sustainable population size is. It just happens that humans are capable of occupying an incredibly large environment.

      Secondly, our most important resource is energy. Fossil fuels, wind, hydro-electric and solar power all ultimately derive their energy content from that big ball of fire in the sky. The sun will be with us for a real long time and technology has been moving it to be cheaper not more expensive to harness the energy as it comes out. Fusion (if it ever works) may provide virtually limitless energy supplies as well.

      This is a general trend, the amount of resources available doesn't change much over time, but the cost to use them goes down because technology improves. Perhaps someday we will resort to mining landfills for raw materials but right now we are no where close to being critically short on most resources. For many raw materials the amount harvested from the environment still exceeds the amount consumed and discarded each year. Often we find alternatives to anything that is suddenly in short supply.

      Coexisting peacefully with our environment is a good thing and we have been slowly moving in that direction. Don't think however that resource limits are going to cramp our lifestyles anytime soon.
      • I just finished reading a book called _The_Next_200_Years_ by Herman Kahn (the same guy who wrote "_Thinking_About_the_Unthinkable_), that talked about these issues specifically. It was written in 1976 (hence the title), but took a much more thorough apporach than most of the Malthusians of the day. It guessed that the increase in population growth would continue to decrease (second derivitive of growth is negative) and result in a global population peaking around 15 billion (plus or minus a factor of 2) in the 22nd century. It also made very good arguments along your lines as to why we won't likely run out of resources on Earth.

        My personal belief is that just to be sure, we should go ahead and start expanding out into space anyway.

        Interestingly, the book also predicted that around 1985 there would be the potential for dangerous internal political issues on the subject of computerized records, computerized surveillance, and improved techniques for preventing disturbances as well as improved means of terrorism and "agitprop".

  • Environmental accounting (Score:4, Interesting)

    by sakusha ( 441986 ) on Sunday September 09, 2001 @10:22AM (#2270595)
    This is all a byproduct of a new system called "environmental accounting." For years, corporations have been used to applying standard accounting techniques to manufacturing processes to maximize profits and process efficiency, but nobody ever thought of applying those accounting methods to environmental issues. The classic EA example is a company that uses mercury in manufacturing. The accountant measures the mercury the co. buys, and subtracts the amount that ends up in the product plus the amount reclaimed from waste. For example, they buy 20 tons a year, and 15 goes into the products, 3 are reclaimed from waste. 2 tons are unaccounted for and are presumed to go directly into the environment. To plug the mercury leak, you just go through the process and see where it's not accounted for.

    This article just cites examples where the gov't has mandated environmental accounting and gives disincentives to inefficient processes. If only we could get people to use EA just because it's good for the environment!

  • Metropolis: good article, same subject (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward

    http://www.metropolismag.com/html/content_0801/mcd /index.html [metropolismag.com]

    About architect William McDonough who's designing 'green' factories for Ford and offices for Adidas.


    He's also (with chemist Dr. Michael Braungart) been reponsible for technological feats such as a swiss textile factory waste water is actually cleaner than the tap water that comes in and a few buildings so energy efficient that they actually produce a surplus.


    He's of the belief that it's not enough to minimize environmental impact -- one must maximize environmental (and cost) benefits. The savings that his energy-efficient designs provide them companies he builds them for can pay construction costs in a matter of a year or two.


    I sincerely hope this kind of thinking represents the future of big business.

    • Actually there is a new sewage plant near where I live that is supposed to be based off of some newer european design which in fact gives off waste water cleaner than the water it takes in. Unfortunatly as dirty and polluted as rivers often tend to be nowdays, I'm not sure this is a very big feat.
  • IO had to clean my room, and I ended up finding a confirmation card from long ago with a $20 bill in it.
  • That is a wonderful piece of propaganda. I don't doubt that the examples cited are true; I just notice that they don't cover the vast majority of cases where complying with evironmental regulation costs the company money but the only payback is that they don't get fined by the EPA and one of the company's executives doesn't risk going to jail. It seems to me that the article is obviously attempting to make more environmental regulation tolerable to businesses by offering the false hope (most of the time) that it will help their bottom line. "A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down." The article does admit that not all companies are lucky enough to turn a profit on environmental compliance, but it says it with the same amount of emphasis as a lottery commerical that briefly mentions the real odds of winning.

    I want to be clear that I am not against keeping the environment clean, I am just against deluding ourselves into thinking that it is cheaper to have high environmental standards than it is to have low ones (unless you start playing with the accounting system like the article suggests and assigning dollar values to intangible things*). Such delusions are not helpful. I will admit that the article is probably right about environmental groups being more effective at dealing with businesses when they learn to talk the language of businessmen; that was an informative tidbit. Any change a business makes, they will tend to try to find a way to make it profitible, so I am not surprised that as an UNINTENDED SIDE EFFECT of environmental regulation, some businesses have figured out a way to make money off their compliance efforts.

    Having made the radical claim that high envirnomental standards cost more to achieve than low standards in most cases; I will admit that there is a link between profit and a clean environment, but in my experience it usually goes the other way. Companies looking for ways to make the most profit tend to also make the most efficient use of raw materials and energy. I have written plenty of capital justifications for changing processes or buying new equipment based on just such efficiency improvements. While the pursuit of profit will help the environment we cannot count on profit alone to keep the country clean. There are too many times where the cheapest thing to do would be to improperly dispose of your waste products. We have to have some judicial, legal, or regulatory measures to prevent abuse of the air and water as waste depositories, but we should not pretend that there is no economic cost to such environmental pursuits.

    While they are doing articles on the economics of environmental compliance, I would like to have seen an article on how premature or bad environmental regulation costs money and jobs and consumes extra resources (isn't that what money represents?) and mis-prioritizes dangers. Like the billions of dollars and increadible amounts of man-hours wasted when useful materials like non-amphible asbestos** are banned or restricted because of ignorance (or sensationalism and pandering) in the newsmedia and the regulatory authories.

    * I do think we, as a society, need to figure out how to put a dollar value on the cleanliness of our envirnoment so that we can more accurately determine what evnironmental regulations can be justified and which ones will have the most benifit per dollar invested. It seems unusual to me that this is actually being done on a corprate level; but I am happy that someone is thinking about it. I wonder if this is the Megacorp. equivilent of those businesses that sell all sorts of products on the basis that they cost more but "help the rainforest" or the electric companies whose power costs more (i.e. consumes more resources) but don't release as much pollution. Something like, "Well, our stocks don't pay as big a dividens but you can feel better yourself by owning our stock because we consider community issues in our business decisions."

    ** which was banned along with the "bad" asbestos.

    • Actually, it would be best for all concerned if every opportunity to legitamately profit from environmentally sensitive behaviour was exploited immediately.

      Get a grip here guy. If it costs money to comply with environmental regulations, chances are that much of that money being spent is creating other waste streams. How much of the cost of trucking waste from away from an incinerator is spent on diesel fuel? Or the waste from a power generation station?

      The absorbing boundary in where every industrial process feeds its waste into other industrial processes. If an input ends its life in a landfill, that input either needs to be eliminated entirely, or another industrial process needs to be invented which reclaims that input (usefully). It does no good burning a pound of diesel fuel to reclaim a pound of some other input.

      Labelling these success stories "propaganda" really irritates me. We should be promoting every small accomplishment at creating closed-loop processes at every opportunity. Enough of this bullshit logic about hydrogren being a "clean" fuel because the carbon is released in some state != California.

      • I have no problems with the statement "it would be best for all concerned if every opportunity to legitametly profit from environmentally sensitive behavior was exploited immediately." I also agree with your statment about it being preferable to use waste than pay to dispose of it. In fact, I am in the business of figuring out how to make industrial processes more efficient while complying with safety and environmental regulations. But this isn't an article in a business or engineering journal about HOW to reduce cost (or turn a profit) with green technologies. It is a newspaper article that gives a false impression about the economics of environmental compliance. I'm sorry if you don't like me calling that "propoganda," but I think this article deliberately provides a distorted impression about how often expendatures on compliance yield net profits.

        Perhaps my response is somewhat selfishly motivated. What happens when some finance manager who considers himself technically competent because he can turn on his computer reads this article, then attends a meeting where I present a proposal to achieve compliance in some industrial process at the cost of several hundred thousand dollars a year? Well, he is going to be shocked that I can't do it for free; or else at a profit. After all, the NYT said everyone else was making a profit, why can't I figure out how to do it?

        I am not saying that none of my capital proposals or process changes results in both profit and environmental benifit. I have made plenty of purchases or changes that were motivated by profit and also wound up eliminating scrap, reducing energy use, or recycling waste products in some other process. Efficiency improvement is, after all, a common way to achieve cost savings. Unfortunately it rarely goes the other way; and giving people the false impression that with modern engineering methods environmental compliance usually yields cost savings does a disservice to the majority of engineers whose compliance efforts will only result in cost increases. It reduces the apparent achievent of engineers who manage to achieve both goals simultaneously. It also does a disservice to the taxpayers who may now think that tougher environmental regulations will come with no cost to the economy. I am not against bragging about clever engineering or applauding those who do it; I am against presenting an atypical result as if it were the norm.
    • Most companies manufacturing product under Europe's stricter environmental laws are more profitable now than they were before they took steps; not because of any fines levied on them, but simply because by decreasing emissions and wastes, they are also lowering their use of energy and water. Working in an environmentally sound manner has tangible financial benefits for the people doing it.

      Clean electricity consuming more resources to produce? Not if it's being produced via solar power or water turbines; neither of those processes uses a finite resource.

      Americans need to stop assuming that theirs is the only country in the world with an understanding of economics. It's that kind of blind arrogance that causes a lot of your problems.
      • But, solar power, windmills, and water turbines do use up finite resources. They may not have fuel costs, but fuel costs are only one of the many costs in bulding and opeating a power plant. For example, the equipment to use the "free" fuel has to be constructed and maintained. This consumes resources (raw materials, energy, labor, land, etc.), which we can convieniently measure as money. If it costs more money to generate power with these "green" technologies, then it is because the amount of resources consumed(measured in dollars) per unit energy produced is higher. I assume that this is the sort of basic economics that you assert even non-Americans possess.

  • Natural Capitalism (Score:1, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward
    There's a really good book that gives several hundred pages of real world cases where being environmentally friendly proved to be significantly more profitable than not being environmentally friendly. It's called "Natural Capitalism". I forget the authors names, but the bibliography is about 50 pages long. Very good book, very well researched. I highly recommend reading it if this subject interests you.

    -D
  • At the moment, this article has 72 comments in total - the lowest on the page and a third of of the number netted by the article with the most comments.

    Does this say something about the proprotion of the readership that doesn't care about the environment?

    It's a shame.


    • That's a strange model of when to open your mouth. Caring about something = having something worth saying. The level of discussion here would be much improved if fewer people believed that.
      • > Caring about something = having something worth
        > saying.

        I see it the otherway around - if people don't care they don't say anything, hence few comments.

        >The level of discussion here would be much >improved if fewer people believed that.

        Naaa. Free speech is better. Let moderators sift discussion and allow users to browse at whatever level they like.

        Sorry I don't agree!

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