Voluntary programs established by the chemical industry to promote environmental standards have been ineffective in pollution control, according to recent research by Michael Lenox, associate professor at the Fuqua School of Business.
A number of companies involved in one of the most respected of these programs, Responsible Care, may actually be polluting more than similar chemical companies not involved with the program, Lenox said.
A widespread problem in Responsible Care--an initiative of the American Chemistry Council--is that many member companies are doing next to nothing to improve their environmental record, Lenox said, erasing the contributions that some major companies, like DuPont, have made in efforts to better their emission standards.
"This is a black eye for the chemical industry," Lenox said.
Responsible Care began in 1988 in response to increasing criticism of the chemical industry. The program was designed as a comprehensive promise to the public by each participating chemical company to be more environmentally conscious and friendly. Responsible Care comprises about 100 chemical companies that represent about 80 percent of the chemical industry's production.
Lenox's findings were based on data between 1987 and 1996, collected from the annually published Environmental Protection Agency report, Toxic Release Inventory. The EPA declined to comment on the accuracy and methodology of this list of toxic chemical emissions.
Terry Yosie, vice president of Responsible Care, said the program is taking Lenox's research and other criticism of the program into serious consideration to improve compliance.
"During 2002, the Responsible Care program has been significantly changed," Yosie wrote in an e-mail. "Prior codes of management practices have been replaced with a modernized management system [and] a new mandatory security program with third-party verification has been implemented."
Yosie pointed to the recent Johannesburg World Summit on Sustainable Development's formal recognition of Responsible Care as one of the world's leading initiatives for improving environmental, health and safety of people around the world.
Lenox originally presented the research in 2000 in the Academy of Management Journal with Andrew King, a professor at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Lenox followed up on the research at a conference this year.
Over time, the chemical industry as a whole has been cleaning up its act, mainly because of public pressure and increased efficiency in production, Lenox said.
The rate at which this improvement has taken place, however, is at the backbone of the problem with Responsible Care, as the rate at which member companies have improved pollution control has been significantly slower than the chemical industry as a whole, according to Lenox's research.
"We took a sample of 1,500 chemical companies and controlled for the variances of the size of the plant and the type of products they produced," Lenox said.
Since there are few costs associated with Responsible Care, as well as no mechanisms for enforcement of regulations, Lenox questions the efficacy of such policy programs. "I'm skeptical of the prospects of industry self-regulation, but I recognize that there are strategies which can solve the current problems," he said.
In spite of these findings, members of Responsible Care, such as the Georgia-Pacific Corporation, still consider the program effective. Meg Fligg, a manager of the corporate communications division of Georgia-Pacific, said her company believes in Responsible Care's goals. However, she could not offer specifics on its compliance.
The Environmental Working Group, a non-profit environmental research organization, finds the Responsible Care program ineffective. "To judge by its professed principles, Responsible Care is a failure. The chemical industry has continued its historic pattern of resisting and undermining government regulations," said EWG spokesperson Jon Corsiglia.
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