Pollution Prevention

The key element of life-cycle design is Life-Cycle Assessment (LCA). LCA is generally envisioned as a process to evaluate the environmental burdens associated with the cradle-to-grave life cycle of a product, process, or activity. A product’s life cycle can be roughly described in terms of the following stages:

1. Raw material
2. Bulk material processing
3. Production
4. Manufacturing and assembly
5. Use and service
6. Retirement
7. Disposal

Maintaining an objective process while spanning this life cycle can be difficult given the varying perspective of groups affected by different parts of that cycle. LCA typically does not include any direct or indirect monetary costs or impacts to individual companies or consumers.

Another fundamental goal of life-cycle design is to promote sustainable development at the global, regional, and local levels. There is significant evidence that suggests that current patterns of human and industrial activity on a global scale are not following a sustainable path.

Changes to achieve a more sustainable system will require that environmental issues be more effectively addressed in the future. Principles for achieving sustainable development should include (Ref. 2):

1. Sustainable resource use (conserving resources, minimizing depletion of nonrenewable resources, using sustainable practices for managing renewable resources). There can be no product development or economic activity of any kind without available resources. Except for solar energy, the supply of resources is finite. Efficient designs conserve resources while also reducing impacts caused by material extraction and related activities. Depletion of nonrenewable resources and overuse of otherwise renewable resources limits their availability to future generations.

2. Maintenance of ecosystem structure and function. This is a principal element of sustainability. Because it is difficult to imagine how human health can be maintained in a degraded, unhealthy natural world, the issue of ecosystem health should be a more fundamental concern. Sustainability requires that the health of all diverse species as well as their interrelated ecological functions be maintained. As only one species in a complex web of ecological interactions, humans cannot separate their success from that of the total system.

3. Environmental justice. The issue of environmental justice has come to mean different things to different people. Theodore (Ref. 3) has indicated that the subject of environmental justice contains four key elements that are interrelated: environmental racism, environmental health, environmental equity, and environmental politics. (Unlike many environmentalists, Theodore has contended that only the last issue, politics, is a factor in environmental justice.) A major challenge in sustainable development is achieving both intergenerational and intersocietal environmental justice. Overconsuming resources and polluting the planet in such a way that it enjoins future generations from access to reasonable comforts irresponsibly transfer problems to the future in exchange for short-term gain. Beyond this intergenerational conflict, enormous inequities in the distribution of resources continue to exist between developed and less developed countries. Inequities also occur within national boundaries.

Life cycle is a perspective that considers the true costs of product production and/or services provided and utilized by analyzing the price associated with potential environmental degradation and energy consumption, as well as more customary costs like capital expenditure and operating expenses. Unfortunately, a host of economic and economic-related terms have appeared in the literature. Some of these include total cost assessment, life-cycle costing, and full-cost accounting.

Unfortunately, these terms have come to mean different things to different people at different times. In an attempt to remove this ambiguity, the following three economic terms are defined below. The reader is also referred to figure below for additional details.

1. Traditional costing procedure (TCP). This accounting procedure only takes into account capital and operating (including environmental) costs.

2. Comprehensive costing procedure (CCP). The economic procedure includes not only the traditional capital and operating costs but also peripheral costs such as liability, regulatory related expensive, borrowing power, and social considerations.

3. Life-cycle costing (LCC). This type of analysis requires that all the traditional costs of project or product system, from rawmaterial acquisition to end-result product disposal, be considered.

The TCP approach is relatively simple and can be easily applied to studies involving comparisons of different equipments, different processes, or even parts of processes. CCP has now emerged as the most realistic approach that can be employed in economic project analyses. It is the recommended procedure for pollution-prevention studies. The LCC approach is usually applied to the life-cycle analysis (LCA) of a product or service. It has found occasional application in project analysis.

The remainder of this subsection on pollution prevention will be concerned with providing the reader with the necessary background to understand the meaning of pollution prevention and its useful implementation. Assessment procedures and the economic benefits derived from managing pollution at the source are discussed along with methods of cost accounting for pollution prevention. Additionally, regulatory and nonregulatory methods to promote pollution prevention and overcome barriers are examined, and ethical considerations are presented. By eliminating waste at the source, all can participate in the protection of the environment by reducing the amount of waste material that would otherwise need to be treated or ultimately disposed; accordingly, attention is also given to pollution prevention in both the domestic and business office environments.

Source Reduction
Recycling
Treatment
Ultimate Disposal
Pollution Prevention Hierarchy