Business is on the "front line" in making sustainable development a reality.
Companies need to take a hard look at how they make their products and deliver their services, and the environmental impact of those products and services. More generally, realizing our sustainability objectives will critically depend on the ability of both industry and government to tackle three key challenges - growth, globalization, and regulation.
Sustaining growth in the developed world and bringing the world's poor up to a similar standard of living will require increased production. This means levels of pollution per unit of production will have to be dramatically reduced, requiring us to rethink how we produce our goods and services.
A number of companies have implemented a very effective pollution prevention approach known as Design for Environment (DfE). At Intel, we have used DfE to reduce pollution per unit of each new generation of Intel products, achieving more than a 50% reduction in total volatile organic compound (VOC) emissions since 1994. During the same time period our total production units have more than doubled.
Going even further, our industrial system will need to substitute electrons, and information generally, for carbon and other materials that pollute. Semiconductors and electronics, for example, play a significant role in increasing the energy efficiency of virtually every sector of our society. Industrial process efficiency, automotive fuel economy, residential climate control - everywhere you look for energy efficiency gains and pollution control you will find that increasingly sophisticated microprocessors, microcontrollers, and electronic instrumentation play a key role.
Among the most important economic trends of the last several decades has been an accelerating integration of national markets. Economic globalization will continue to be the engine that will drive improved living and environmental standards throughout the world.
Leadership companies with international manufacturing operations apply the same performance standards and management approaches to their facilities worldwide, despite wide disparities in the stringency of local environmental regulations. Beyond their direct impact in reducing emissions, this "one EHS" philosophy has positive ripple effects on other local operations. Especially in developing countries, where environmental management capabilities may be rudimentary at best, the exemplary performance of foreign firms helps to set a higher standard for all. Many firms, including Intel, are now moving beyond this stage by instituting auditing programs and providing technical assistance to improve the environmental performance and sustainability of local suppliers. This is the standard of global "good citizenship" that should guide all companies in their foreign operations.
Today's environmental statutes and regulations were to a great extent developed to deal with yesterday's problems and do not work as well in addressing more diffuse problems like ground-level ozone, much less sustainable development. In some cases regulations can create barriers to pollution prevention and other tangible actions that advance sustainability.
Air toxics regulations, for example, require very high levels of control for specific Volatile Organic Compounds (VOCs). Although air emissions from Intel's facilities are relatively modest (equivalent in some cases to those from a large gas station), air permitting procedures can be instrumental to economic success or failure. Semiconductor manufacturing is characterized by an almost constant series of changes made to improve production yields and quality. A typical Intel facility makes upwards of 200 chemical recipe and process equipment changes each year. Permitting programs or regulations that require paperwork revisions for each change can slow or stop production without any improvement to air quality and retard air quality progress explicitly designed to reduce emissions.
What is both possible and necessary is serious regulatory "reinvention" that provides alternative approaches for addressing new problems in more flexible ways. EPA has in recent years initiated many such reinvention efforts. What is needed now is to take the lessons learned in reinvention projects and use them to make permanent changes in the mainstream regulatory system.
The world is fast becoming highly urbanized. Today, just half of the people on Earth live in or around cities. By the middle of the 21st century, however, an estimated 75% of the world's population will be urban dwellers. At the same time, advances in economics, technology, and transportation are making societies around the world increasingly mobile.
The challenges of these converging trends - urbanization and mobility - are immense. In virtually every nation, governments and private industry will have to ensure that the impact of development of all kinds can be sustained by the environment. Infrastructure and land use issues will take center stage, along with the need for transportation that is fast, effective, and environmentally compatible.
How can private industry meet these critical needs and challenges in the coming century? How can we further the cause of sustainable development? Those are questions that virtually every large manufacturing company must grapple with daily.
At GM, one way we are meeting the challenges of the next century is through our work on advanced technology vehicles. Certainly, no car company will be able to thrive in the future being solely dependent on the internal combustion engine. That's why GM has led the way in bringing environmentally compatible, alternative-fuel vehicles to market.
These include the EV1, the first purpose-built electric vehicle in modern times, which we introduced in California and Arizona in 1996; an electric Chevrolet S-10 pickup truck; and larger Chevrolet and GMC trucks powered by propane or compressed natural gas. Meanwhile, we are continuing research on a broad range of advanced-technology solutions and vehicles. Our strategy is to develop a portfolio of products that will meet the needs of the highly complex transportation infrastructures of the 21st century.
For decades now, General Motors has appreciated the importance of having a manufacturing presence in the countries in which we sell our products. These facilities are typically in or near urban areas. When they're no longer needed for manufacturing, finding innovative and productive uses for these facilities is a high priority for us.
This effort, often called brownfield redevelopment, can create valuable, productive sites that are an asset to the communities in which they are located. Our goal at GM is to find beneficial uses for these properties that will spur revitalization and redevelopment. That, in turn, can bring new jobs and businesses, increase property values, and a larger tax base.
One successful example of brownfield redevelopment is in General Motors' global headquarters city - Detroit, Michigan. Located on the site of Cadillac's former manufacturing headquarters, the Clark Street Technology Park was developed by GM through an innovative partnership with several major real estate development companies, a bank, and city and state governments.
GM dismantled most of the buildings on the 80-acre site, creating 1.5 million square feet of reusable space. When complete, the Park will represent new investment of more than $125 million and will create as many as 1,700 new jobs in Detroit, in addition to stimulating development in the surrounding neighborhood. GM has similar efforts completed or underway in most regions of the world, recycling land into a variety of uses, such as soccer fields (in Flint, Michigan) and wetlands (in the Detroit suburb of Romulus).
Sustainable development depends greatly on leadership, teamwork, community involvement and education.The men and women of General Motors share those values. And whether through the cars we build, the partnerships we form, or our efforts as stewards of the land we own, we are committed to doing our part for sustainability.
