Workshop: Sustainability Metrics
March 16, 2009 by Brian Butler , , John Morelli , and | Filed under: Sustainability Metrics [4]
Sustainability Metrics – Metrics have been used with varying success in EHS. As the profession has matured, there have been over 25 voluntary standards put into practice relating to sustainable performance with varying levels of measurement from extremely precise to more holistic. This workshop will explore what the current metrics are related to sustainable performance measurement and surmise what they should be related to determining appropriate targets and goals.
Moderator: Dr. Jennifer L. Schneider
It is believed that sustainability metrics should focus in the five main areas:
1- Environmental systems
2- Reducing environmental stresses (impacts)
3- Reducing human exposure to environmental stresses
4- Social and organizational capacity to respond to environmental challenges
5- Global partnership
If I look at environmental metrics over ten years of industrial experience, they typically focus on a number tied to either an operating permit or an internal goal. These numbers tend to be generated after a production process (pounds or waste generated, gallons of water used, ponds of VOC released) or could be based on an estimate. The organized is held to a percent reduction to these metrics for some type of benefit, either financial or peer recognition.
From a permit perspective, most now include some type of small requirement for source reduction or recycling strategies. The question becomes, how do you leverage or increase these requirements to drive process change to become zero waste? If I look at a forward-looking safety metric, such as near miss reporting, the thought is that situations with potential to cause injury are identified before injury occurs and corrective actions are put into place to prevent said injury. Would it be possible to put a similar process in place to consider pollution as a near miss and drive similar corrective actions to prevent said pollution?
From a safety perspective, incidents can be translated into financial data to provide a more concrete, visual effect on the business. It would be beneficial to do the same with environmental data; in some cases to highlight the fact that materials may often needs to be paid for twice (purchase and disposal).
I think we are currently driving towards waste reduction, when you look at programs suchs as LDAR (leak detection and repair) you are identfing connections, flanges, joints, pumps and the potentional for increased emissions. Also programs such as PMP (pollution minimization programs) are aimed at reducing discharges to the environment. If we look at substuition, a large amount of companies are switching chemicals with ones that are less harmful to the environment. I know that at our facility we are now taking product that was off-grade and re-processing it, in the past we would send this to a landfill, today we now turning it into product that can be sold. This has decreased landfill waste, and in turn saved the company money.