Throughout his existence on Earth, even before history started being recorded, man adapted his needs to his natural environment.  Man’s adaptability to changing conditions and resources is remarkable.  His habitat has spread to all parts of the Earth, and this adaptation has produced a great diversity of life-styles and cultures.  However, over a period of time, there has been mismanagement and misuse of the environmental resources on which the very survival of man depends.  Thus today, we are facing a serious situation, which calls for better management of the environment so that sustained development can take place in harmony with the environment.

The emergence of the concept of sustainable development in recent years has brought in the general realization that societal perceptions must shift towards ecological determinism so as to achieve qualitative growth within the limits of the ecosystem’s carrying capacity.

The term ‘environment’ is often used in a broad sense, covering almost any condition or factor surrounding people – be it physical, biological, technical, economic, political, cultural, psychological, etc.  While such a holistic concept is no doubt stimulating to the mind, the practical issue of managing the environment rationally requires a more precisely defined term.  For that purpose, we may consider that the human environment consists of two sets of interacting factors:

a)    The physical resources of the environment necessary to sustain life and to satisfy people’s needs; and

b)    The social factors that determine the ways in which people utilize these resources.

Among the social factors, technology is of special interest, i.e. the tools and processes developed by man to transform resources into products for his use.  The other important factors are economic, i.e. the generation and distribution of wealth and the patterns of production and consumption and environmental law, which defines the rights and duties in the use of resources and the preservation of the quality of environment.

It has often been mentioned that technology is at the root of environmental problems, leading, to pollution, generation of wastes and depletion of resources.  However, technology can also play a major part in providing the solution to these problems.  This is the objective of Environment Friendly Technology (EFT), an approach that considers production, use and final disposal of a product in a total input-output framework.  Within this framework are included the materials and energy consumed in production alongwith all the outputs, including waste generated from the production process.

The control of industrial pollution started with the “end-of-the-pipe” abatement technology, such as filters, scrubbers and precipitators to eliminate gaseous pollutants and particulates from stack gases, and suspended solids and dissolved materials from liquid effluents.  The problem with these devices is that they can be expensive, consume much energy and sometimes merely transform pollutants from one form to another.  Furthermore, the added cost of abatement is often quite high in polluting industries.  Nevertheless, much of today’s pollution control is based on abatement technology.  Environment-friendly technology on the other hand, seeks to modify the entire process with a view to conserving resources, reducing pollution and generating little or no waste.

Technological progress has three objectives: to be economically viable, to improve the quality of life, and to have positive impact on the environment.  All these three objectives must be critically assessed before implementation as waste from industrial, domestic or agricultural processes can easily disturb the ecological balance.  As far as an enterprise is concerned, long term investment in a technology requires a key management decision, since its choice tends to lock the enterprise into a particular methodology, which dictates the inputs, processes and outputs for a long time.

Industry in India, to a large extent, has been modelled on the lines, which existed in industrialized countries.  In fact, many plant processes have been imported on a turnkey basis, the modes of operation being highly conventional.  While there exists a great potential for the newly coming up industries to resort to environmentally benign technologies, remodelling of the existing ones would require significant economic investment and face a resistance to change.

Some of the constraints for a change over include lack of knowledge of cleaner technologies that are available, coupled with an unwillingness to adopt processes that are seen as untried.  In addition to the technical and economic risks bound up with the establishment of any new procedure, it would appear that the risk in terms of working conditions such as changes in habits and human adaptation, acts as a brake on dissemination of clean technologies.  There would also be difficulties in drawing up the criteria for selecting R&D projects for support and the amount of money would again have to be large to have a significant impact.  Without prior and independent financial commitment from industry, the technologies would not be developed to the point of commercialization.

It would not be possible to achieve a technological shift only by enacting legislation, but by introducing positive policies of promotion specifically devoted to generate interest amongst industries for prevention of pollution at source. Environment-friendly tech-nologies could become attractive in the existing circumstances, provided that the conditions of marketability, cost-effectiveness and availability of technical know-how could be satisfied.

The innovative clean technologies are supposed to have various advantages over the conventional capital-intensive methods of pollution control.  These gains include the following:

In many cases, adopting the preventive approach through environment-friendly technology can be a source of profits for the enterprise.  Increased profits can result from cutting costs through improved material efficiency, using your own manpower and know-how to make improvements and selling by-products and residues.

In this context, some of the strategies, which can be applied to promote environment-friendly technologies, are as follows:

It will therefore be seen that there is a considerable benefit to the enterprise in adopting environment friendly technologies, while contributing at the same time to the larger objective of protecting the environment and conserving resources.    q

The author has been a Chamber of Commerce official
with 37 years of professional and management experience

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