Environmental accountability reports

The operating company must underwrite the emissions associated with the plant through environmental impact reporting. Such accounting has become an important part of the design. Rather than pass over the need for a closed heat and material balance at the study stage of a project, it is better to get this job done as early as possible. Persistence is sometimes required. 

The result of the sustainability accounting/reporting is to provide all the elements necessary for sustainability auditing (e.g., for ISO 14000 environmental management standards) and to evaluate the sustainability performance of a company, organization or other entity using various performance indicators. 

Effectively managing and communicating company environmental performance to such a wide variety of receptors requires some form of systematisation. This can take the form of Environmental Management Systems (EMS), Environmental Accounting (EA), Environmental Performance Indicators (EPI) and environmental reporting. 

A key requirement is for firms (at all levels in the production chain) to undertake, as a first step, a life cycle analysis of their products, and to monitor the behaviour of their suppliers and customers. This may well occur in conjunction with an internal environmental review or audit, which will prompt the firm to scrutinise closely all aspects of its operations. There are a range of complex issues concerning the identification and measurement of environmental costs and benefits, and the impact of environmental factors on the valuation of company liabilities and productive assets, which are only now being fiiUy addressed by new environmental accounting techniques. Part of the problem is that there is no legal requirement for companies to disclose environmental expenditures separately, or to report publicly on their environmental policy and performance, although this is likely to change in the future. 

Whether the company can be prosecuted or not for lack of environmental accountability depends on the perceived severity of the hazard in question. In many cases, a company s acceptance of environmental accountability is voluntary, as the following extracts from the 1997 aimual report of the Kodak company in Rochester, N.Y., indicate. Apart from community-service value is the inestimable revenue that results from increased goodwill and positive publicity. See Table E-6 and Figs. E-37 and E-38. 

Environmental accountability takes on particular significance in Scandinavian countries, whose history indicates they practiced this method of total involvement with sustaining their environment long before there were definitions in any language for it. Their reporting parameters support this fact, as the following extracts from the Cultor corporation s annual report indicate. ... 

Chlor—alkah production is the largest iadustrial source of mercury release ia the United States (see Alkali and chlorine products). For the 1991 reporting year, chlor—alkah faciUties accounted for almost 20% of the faciUties that reported releases of mercury to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for inclusion onto the Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) (25). 

Team reporting Report to General Manager-Environmental, Health, and Safety keep others informed as needed via formal and informal reports. [Accountability]... 

Vaccari (1983,1999) has given a state-of-the-art account of the preparation and catalytic properties of cationic and anionic clays. Some examples of industrial importance have also been reported. Clays exhibit many desirable features, such as low cost, wide range of preparation variables, ease of set-up and wOrk-up, high selectivity, and environmental friendliness. Cationic clays are widespread in nature, whereas anionic clays are rarely found in nature, but they can be synthesized cheaply. Cationic clays are prepared from the minerals but industrial anionic clays are generally synthetic. Smectite clays exhibit both Brpnsted and Lewis acid sites on the edges of the crystals. Hammet s acidity function values are as follows Na -montmorillonite (M), -3 to t- 1.5 NH4VM -3 to 1.5 H M -8.2 to -5.6 acid activated clay less than -8.2. Laporte also has a synthetic version of cationic clays, Laponite. The acid... 

According to the Toxics Release Inventory, in 1994, the estimated releases of lead of 1,728,918 pounds (784,224 kg) to air from 1,454 large processing facilities accounted for about 10.2% of the total environmental releases of lead (TRI96 1998). Table 5-1 lists amounts released from these facilities. The TRI data should be used with caution, however, since only certain types of facilities are required to report. This is not an exhaustive list. 

In actual practice, environmental samples which are contaminated with PCB are also highly likely to be contaminated with chlorinated insecticides. Many reports have appeared discussing co-interference effects of chlorinated insecticides in the determination of PCB and vice versa, and much of the more recent published work takes account of this fact by dealing with the analysis of both types of compounds. This work is discussed below. 

The following is a brief selective listing of major worldwide fire and explosion incidents within the hydrocarbon and chemical industries during the last 25 years (1970 - 1994), both onshore and offshore. Numerous smaller incidents have been recorded that are not listed here but may be studied in other references. Where the number of fatalities has been reported in public accounts they are listed next to the financial loss. Financial losses are direct property damage losses and do not include business interruption, legal, or environmental impacts. 

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