Seize the moment.

• Author: Deland, Michael R.
• Position: Merging environmental and economic goals - Meeting the Environmental Challenge

Strong environmental performance can be turned into competitive advantage, and the U.S. can reap economic, environmental, and geopolitical benefits.

After nearly 25 years of increasing government regulation, the nation enjoys a cleaner, safer environment, but that progress came at great cost, and major challenges remain. To address those challenges responsibly and efficiently in the future, we need to find ways to merge economic and environmental goals.

For years, the trade-offs between economic growth and environmental protection have polarized the debate and hindered progress. The future will be shaped by a recognition that economic and environmental forces react in more complex ways. A growing number of business executives worldwide are demonstrating that we can have both economic growth and a cleaner, safer environment. Common sense suggests that sound policies promote both simultaneously.

Corporate America faces a range of important opportunities in this new symbiosis of environment and economy. Through strategies emphasizing pollution prevention, partnerships with conservationists, and global leadership, businesses can protect the environment even as they strengthen their competitive position.

Today, a movement is underway to gain economic efficiencies by preventing pollution before it occurs rather than cleaning it up after the fact. Corporations can increase profit margins by reducing wastes, increasing energy efficiency, and implementing environmentally friendly management practices.

Since the 1970s, pollution control has been the most common approach to cleaning our environment. The U.S. will spend an estimated $130 billion on environmental protection in 1992, putting us among the world leaders in the share of national income spent on pollution control (about 2%).

However, control technologies often do not eliminate pollutants but, rather, transfer it -- for example, from smokestack gases to scrubber sludge that must be dumped elsewhere. By contrast, prevention techniques, such as elimination of toxic inputs or reusing or recycling materials, can prevent emissions altogether. Prevention cuts the costs of regulatory compliance, not to mention litigation; community relations are also improved.

Many leaders of the prevention movement have adopted an institutional ethic called Quality Environmental Management (QEM), a close relation of the Total Quality Management (TQM) ethic. Just as defect prevention is more cost effective than...