Remolding the environmental function.

• Author: Daniell, Robert F.
• Position: Environmental policies of the United Technologies Corp. - Chairman's Agenda: Managing Environmental Responsibility

Remolding the Environmental Function

Federal environmental regulations today total some 35,000 pages, and Corporate America must comply with every subsection and semicolon on those multitudinous pages. As a leader or as a follower, every company that operates in the United States must deal with environmental protection issues that are growing in volume and complexity. At the same time, we are seeing hopeful signs of industry's increasing concern and responsibility for its own environmental actions.

That is the case at United Technologies Corp., where we are motivated not only by the tangible rewards of good environmental citizenship but also by the threat of serious penalties that can be levied by various federal, state, and local environmental enforcement agencies.

I do not pretend to be an expert in the field, nor to hold up United Technologies as a shining example of a company that has achieved perfect environmental compliance. But, I hope, by describing the process we've gone through, some of the landmarks and milestones along the way, and, particularly, how we have structured and restructured our environmental organization in the past few years to cope with changing needs, we may offer some helpful lessons to other companies.

A decade or so ago, our corporate environmental staff of half a dozen people was a part of our Government Affairs function. Theirs was mainly a service role: performing some training for our operating units, doing some regulatory monitoring, and, in general, reacting to problems.

In the mid-1980s, the environmental function began reporting to Human Resources. And, in 1988, environmental and safety - historically separate - were integrated under one director of Human and Natural Resource Protection. This was done to eliminate redundancy, to recognize the fact that much of the legislation and regulation dealt with concerns that involved both the environment and safety staffs, and to apply the safety function's long history of experience and practice to the relatively new field of environmental protection.

But as regulations proliferated (at an average of two major pieces of legislation a year since the Clean Air Act of 1972) and as enforcement intensified, we realized that a few organizational changes at the corporate level just weren't enough to make a difference in how we were attacking the problem as a corporation.

And there was no consistency across the company as to how environmental issues were being handled...