Romanian Enterprises Reduce Pollution While Improving Performance Using Public-Private Partnership Collaboration Methodologies

By Avrom Bendavid-Val
Vice President for Environment and Development
Chemonics International Inc.

About the Author...

Avrom Bendavid-Val is Vice President for Environment and Development at Chemonics International Inc. Through Chemonics, he has helped implement environmental management systems and pollution prevention programs and delivered training to industrial and utility managers and to environmental service providers in the U.S., Russia, Central and Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. With an environmental engineer co-author, Mr. Bendavid-Val has recently published two commercial books on pollution prevention (P2) and Environmental Management Systems (EMS): Green Profits: the Manager's Handbook for ISO 14001 and Pollution Prevention (Butterworth-Heinemann, 2001), and Achieving Environmental Excellence: Integrating EMS and P2 to Increase Profits (Government Institutes, 2003).

Abstract

After a serious cyanide spill in Romania that resulted in severe water contamination, the need for improved performance in pollution reduction became an urgent issue for water utilities in Romania. Avrom Bendavid-Val describes a partnership approach between water utilities and enterprises creating pollution that has had a real impact on improving water quality.

Introduction

In January 2000 Romania experienced a major cyanide spill near the city of Baia Mare. The spill resulted in severe river contamination, including extensive fish kills in tributaries to the Danube River and ultimately in the Danube itself.

Sludge with solid waste at a tannery in Oradea, Romania

This spill had transboundary impacts, flowing down the Tisa River to the Danube, and then out to the Black Sea, affecting Hungary, Serbia, and Bulgaria, as well as Romania. The international frictions that resulted still have not been completely resolved.

Partnership Solutions

The Government of Romania, with assistance from the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) and Chemonics International, responded to this crisis by demonstrating to Romanian enterprises how they could improve their competitiveness and sustainability while greatly reducing their polluting discharges, and at the same time, prevent occurrence of and be prepared for accidental spills. The keys were to foster public-private partnerships that would promote and support efforts by enterprises to undertake pollution prevention (P2) activities and set up environmental management systems (EMSs).

P2 derives from the fact that a company's pollution represents costly waste, and involves undertaking measures to reduce pollution at the source. This means improving the efficiency of production processes so as to minimize waste and energy use. P2 generally lowers production costs and therefore benefits a company's bottom line- by contrast, "end-of-pipe" treatment of pollution adds to production costs and therefore reduces a company's profitability.

An EMS is a planned and organized way for an enterprise to manage its interactions with the environment, especially those that consume natural resources and energy, degrade the environment, or endanger human health. Under an EMS an enterprise establishes a planning and implementation process for continually improving its environmental performance, mostly through P2 procedures and investments.

In February 2002, a program of P2 and EMS training was launched and partnerships developed with five enterprises in the cities of Cluj-Napoca and Oradea: a pharmaceuticals manufacturing company, a pigments manufacturing company, a maker of salicylic acid, and two municipal water utilities.

Computer simulation training in the EMS-P2 unit in Romania

All five enterprises were heavy water polluters and not in compliance with regulatory water discharge standards. Local environmental protection inspectorates were also heavily involved in the program in an effort both to educate their personnel about P2 and EMS as tools for reducing pollution and to foster a collaborative problem-solving partnership relationship between the inspectorates and the enterprises they are responsible for inspecting.

After a little over a year, all the partner enterprises had undertaken at least one significant P2 measure, had established initial EMSs in the most heavily polluting parts of their operations, and had begun elaborating and strengthening their EMSs and extending them to other parts of the plants. Four of the enterprises had invested their own funds in P2 measures, in amounts ranging from $16,000 to $230,000. As part of their EMSs, all the enterprises designed or upgraded emergency preparedness and response plans designed to minimize pollution and maximize safety in the event of an emergency.

Wastewater treatment plants run by the water utilities cannot practice P2 in the usual sense because they are by definition "end-of-pipe" pollution treatment facilities. So in addition to improving monitoring and treatment of wastewater, the water utilities establish P2 "Action Groups" through which the water utilities worked with heavily polluting "upstream" factories to find ways to reduce their pollution at the source. The benefit to the water utilities is that they receive cleaner wastewater that is easier to treat properly and is less likely to damage sewer networks and biological treatment processes.

In the first year of the program partner enterprises took actions that are already resulting in significant reductions in a wide variety of polluting discharges. For example, these plants now release 15 tons less phenols, 24 tons less sulfuric acid, and 3 tons less zinc oxide each year into Romania's waterways. Because of the P2 measures they took, enterprises in the program are also saving nearly two million cubic meters of water annually and over 140 MW of energy annually. In all, as a result of only the "first round" of P2 actions, the partner enterprises will save a minimum of over $275,000 every year. All this is in addition to vastly improved regulatory compliance.

Because of this public-private partnership approach, a new level of collaboration among Environmental Protection Inspectorates, water utilities, and factories to reduce pollution at the source has been established in Cluj-Napoca and Oradea. This will help ensure a continuing process of improving environmental performance in those cities.

Lessons Learned

The three most important lessons learned from this pilot project include the following:

• Constructive collaboration between environmental regulatory enforcement agencies and industry yields better environmental performance than a compliance system based on inspections, permits, and penalties alone.
• Creating and developing partnerships between wastewater treatment utilities and their upstream industrial customers that involve the sharing of testing equipment, knowledge, and other resources are essential for achieving substantial reductions in polluting effluents from industry.
• To be successful, efforts to encourage enterprises to establish EMSs or otherwise to commit to materially improving their environmental performance must begin with measures that yield significant bottom-line benefits as well as improved environmental performance.

It is expected that further rollout across Romania will follow as "best practices" conferences are held in July 2003 to disseminate the lessons of the program's experience with P2, EMS, and public-private partnerships models to reduce pollution and foster enterprise competitiveness and sustainability. The conferences will also provide introductory P2 and EMS training to other Romanian enterprises and environmental authorities.

For further information, you may reach Mr. Bendavid-Val at:
ABendavid@chemonics.net