New Zealand Chemical Industry Council

The perception that the industry has not been working hard to improve, is not borne out by the facts. An initiative named Responsible Care which is the chemical industry s commitment to continuous improvement in all aspects of health, safety and environmental protection was launched in Canada in 1984. It was adopted by the USA in 1988 and has been spreading around the world since then. Apart from North America and Europe which are discussed below, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, Mexico, Argentina, India, Zimbabwe and other countries have adopted it [5]. The European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) has drawn up guidelines which are given in Figure 1.1 [5]. In the UK, where the Chemical Industries Association (CIA) makes participation in the Responsible Care initiative a condition of membership, discharges of red list substances (compounds of mercury and cadmium, DDT, malathion, triphenyl and tributyl tin, etc.) fell by 40% between 1990 and 1992 whilst special wastes (compounds of arsenic, antimony, barium, mercury, nickel, vanadium, etc.) disposed of off site fell by 9% [6]. The Chemical Manufacturers Association (CMA) in the USA also makes participation a condition of membership and one of its Pollution Prevention Code requirements is very relevant to this book ... 

A voluntary notification and assessment for new industrial chemicals, the Interim Notification Scheme (INS), operated until 17 July 1990, under the auspices of the Australian and New Zealand Environment Council. 

At the second meeting of the Council of the FEDERATION in Kyoto July 31, 1988, 3 applications for admission to the PACIFIC POLYMER FEDERATION had been received. The Council decided to admit all three organizations The Macromolecular Science and Engineering Division of the Chemical Institute of Canada, the Society of Polymer Science of Korea and the Polymer and Industrial Section of the Malaysian Institute of Chemistry and invited them to provide one Councillor each for their admission date, January 1989. The second Council Meeting was held near Brisbane, Australia on February 6, 1989. Two more organizations were admitted to the FEDERATION The Polymer Division of the Chinese Chemical Society of the People s Republic of China and the Polymer Group of the New Zealand Institute of Chemistry. We now... 

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