Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
are taking place that support this sort of systems change. Germany has pio-
neered the use of product and packaging take back regulations that have
stimulated important advances in green packaging design as well as in DFE
in the electronics industry.Various northern European countries have also
established voluntary eco-labels, like Germany's well known Blue Angel
label, that help green consumers identify and purchase more environmen-
tally benign products. In addition, various industry trade organizations have
established rules and processes by which firms can certify that they have
implemented environmental management systems that meet the organiza-
tion's standards.The best known of these voluntary industry standards is the
International Organization for Standardization's 14000 standard, but the
British Standards Organization has also promulgated its own set of standards
and the European Community has implemented a standard known as
EMAS. Admittedly, these advances are mostly taking root in Europe, where
the environmental movement is far more advanced than in the United
States. But they support the development of a marketplace that rewards cor-
porations for selling environmentally sound products and establishing
stronger corporate environmental management systems.This creates incen-
tives for managers and engineers to adopt the principles of industrial ecol-
ogy for competitive advantage.
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What does all this mean for historians of business and the environment?
First, it means that business is possibly at the cusp of a major historical
change, a paradigm shift. To help corporate managers, policy makers, and
the public as a whole better understand what is going on, we historians
must start trying to put this change into historical perspective.This is why
I am working on a history of industrial pollution control in the United
States that will go back to the Industrial Revolution.We have our jobs cut
out for us, trying to explain the history of how business got to the point it
is today in its management of its environmental impacts. Second, industrial
ecology offers us historians an important and very useful conceptual frame-
work that we can use to think about and explore the nature of business's
interaction with the natural world over time in all its many dimensions.The
concept reminds us that the history of business and the environment
includes the history of the extraction of natural resources for economic
production, the design, distribution, use, and disposal of consumer goods,
and the history of factory pollution control. It encourages us to recognize
that business firms are far more than organizational structures managed by
people pursuing efficiency and profit maximization in an economic mar-
