Organizations in Sustainable Development 

Sustainable development is about producing products at no net loss to the environment.  Not only does this make environmental sense; it makes dollars and sense!

Here are some EPA-Related programs in sustainable development today.

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Through the Environmentally Preferable Purchasing Program, EPA is leveraging the strength of federal buying power as an incentive for industry to develop environmentally preferable products. Federal, state, and local government and private-sector pilot projects are now incorporating environmental considerations into their purchasing processes.

The Design for the Environment Program (DfE) is a government-industry partnership that seeks to incorporate environmental considerations into the design and redesign of products, processes, and technical and management systems. The DfE program forms voluntary partnerships with industry, universities, research institutions, public interest groups, and other government agencies to ensure that the information developed through their voluntary efforts reaches managers, industrial design engineers, and materials specifiers and buyers. In this way, DfE helps to incorporate environmental considerations into traditional business decision-making processes.

The Green Chemistry Challenge recognizes and promotes chemical technologies that reduce or eliminate the use or generation of hazardous substances during the design, manufacture, and use of chemical products and processes. More specifically, the Green Chemistry program supports fundamental research in the area of environmentally benign chemistry as well as a variety of educational activities, international activities, conferences and meetings, and tool development, all through voluntary partnerships with academia, industry, and other government agencies.

Manufacturers of complex products such as automobiles, appliances, electronics, ships, and aircraft depend on a broad network of suppliers for parts and assemblies. Many of the suppliers in these supply chains are small and medium-size businesses specializing in manufacturing operations. The DfE Program's Supplier Initiative  is exploring how to utilize these networks to reduce environmental burdens over the entire chain, while limiting the possibility of shifting environmental burdens from one link in the supply chain to another. The DfE Program has entered into a partnership with Saturn and its suppliers and the University of Tennessee Center for Clean Products and Clean Technologies to develop a framework that can be transferred to other industry sectors with large, diverse supply chains.

The Energy Star program encourages product manufacturers to increase the energy-efficiency of their products and, at the same time, inform consumers about the money-saving environmental benefits of products that use less energy. The Energy Star label indicates that a product is considered energy-efficient according to the program's specifications. The Energy Star program has made significant strides in encouraging the production and use of energy-efficient appliances, lighting, heating, air conditioning, and office equipment by both homeowners and businesses.

The WasteWise voluntary partnership program, with over 900 partners, challenges businesses and governments to reduce waste from their offices and facilities as well as reduce waste from their products at end-of-life. The program challenges partners to set goals for waste prevention, recycling, and/or purchase or manufacture of recycled products. Program representatives help organizations identify cost-saving opportunities to reduce waste and increase recycling by setting goals and devising strategies to meet those goals. The program publicly recognizes organizations demonstrating exceptional achievements.

The Consumer Labeling Initiative is a voluntary, cooperative effort to foster pollution prevention, empower consumer choice, and improve understanding by presenting clear, consistent, and useful information on household consumer product labels.

The Environmental Accounting Project helps business decision-makers compare the costs of non-preventive approaches with the economic benefits of pollution prevention. The program provides numerous resources to help companies "make the business case" for pollution prevention, including software tools and case studies.

The Emerging Strategies Division in EPA's Office of Policy is exploring the trends behind a new public-private system of environmental management, one that is more flexible, performance-based, and cooperative. The Division is identifying, evaluating, and encouraging strategies and tools for improving environmental performance in the business sector. Projects include evaluation of corporate environmental performance measurement, environmental implications of the growing service sector, and corporate sustainability strategies.

Materials Flow Project.  Because all environmental problems are ultimately related to flows of materials, the World Resources Institute (WRI), with support from EPA's Office of Policy, is developing indicators that capture a picture of the material flows through industrial economies: industrial minerals, construction materials, metals, chemicals, infrastructure, fossil fuels, soil erosion, renewables, semi-manufactures, finished products, and hidden flows.

The Global Reporting Initiative (GRI), with support from EPA's Office of Policy, was launched in the fall of 1997 by the Coalition for Environmentally Responsible Economies (CERES) to advance standardized sustainability reporting worldwide. GRI seeks to build a consensus among business, non-governmental organizations, professional accounting societies, and other stakeholders around a uniform structure and standardized indicators and metrics. This common approach will be applicable to firms operating anywhere in the world, in both industrial and developing countries. GRI seeks to hasten the day when corporate environmental reports achieve a level of comparability and consistency similar to corporate financial reporting.

The Northwest Council on Extended Product Responsibility is an ad hoc group of government representatives from EPA, City of Seattle Public Utilities, Snohomish County, King County Solid Waste Division, and King County Marketing Commission, with the long-term goal of integrating extended product responsibility into the economic and policy structures of the Northwest. The Northwest Council is planning to sponsor an event, to be held in Spring 2000, that will both educate participants about EPR and develop a detailed series of next action steps. In an effort to prepare for a successful event, the Council selected a few key products around which to begin extended product responsibility stakeholder discussions. Specifically, the product categories selected are: computers and CRTs, tires, and, if time and resources allow, paint and a segment of packaging

This page was last updated on 07/27/07