Environmentally Benign Manufacturing: Trends in Europe, Japan,

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and the USA

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Georgia Institute of Technology

2002

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Introduction

Among industrial activities in the US, the contribution of manufacturing to various environmental

impacts is enormous. Taken collectively, manufacturing industries dominate in such areas as; 1!

toxic chemicals, 2! waste, 3! energy, and 4! carbon emissions. Manufacturing is also a heavy user

of water, and there have been many cases of air, water and soil contamination which have led to

such actions as Superfund cleanups, class actions suits and a variety of other corporate liabilities.

For example, among the industries selected by the EPA for toxic materials monitoring,

manufacturing releases are larger than all other activities, with the one exception of metals mining,

which is closely related to manufacturing. This is shown in Fig. 1, which gives the 1998 EPA Toxic

Release Inventory ~TRI! results by industrial categories. This figure becomes even more

significant when one realizes that the United States produces more waste than any other country in

the world. This is true both on an absolute scale as well as a per capita scale. Hence US

manufacturing might be characterized as the most wasteful industrial activity, in the most wasteful

nation.