Stewardship starts at the board level.

• Author: Sklenar, Herbert A.
• Position: Leadership in Environmental Initiatives

Clearly, the time for the creation of a Safety, Health and Environmental Affairs Committee of the board had come.

In both of our businesses -- construction aggregates and industrial chemicals -- we make products that are essential or highly important to the standard of living all of us have come to enjoy. But, in each case, our operations or our products, or both, give concern to people. With regard to our quarries, people, especially neighbors, are concerned about appearance, blasting, noise, dust, surface and subsurface water, and truck traffic. With respect to our chemical operations, people worry about safety of both our plants and our products and about air emissions, groundwater contamination, and how we handle and dispose of our wastes.

These concerns have resulted in various impacts on Vulcan -- sometimes on the demand for our products, almost always on our costs of doing business, and frequently on our ability to start new, or maintain current, operations.

The significance of these concerns has been magnified tremendously by the growth of environmentalism, by changes in regulatory and tort law, and by advances in technology. Most business executives are intimately acquainted with the first two of these trends. But many may not realize the extent to which those trends have been influenced by developments in technology.

For me, this third trend is epitomized by the dramatic technological developments that have resulted in analytic instruments that can detect chemicals in food or the environment in extremely minute quantities. For example, it was little more than two decades ago that the ability of instruments to measure trace quantifies of a substance was typically limited to one part per million. That's equivalent to identifying one second in a period of 12 days. The next major advance was to instruments that can detect one part per billion. That is equivalent to finding one second in a period of 32 years. Today, we have instruments that can measure one part per trillion. This is analogous to locating one second in 32,000 years!

The impact of science and technology has been to raise dramatically society's ability to detect both real and trivial environmental risks. But our ability or willingness to distinguish between what is real and what is trivial lags far behind our ability to detect such risks. Meanwhile, politicians and regulators react to fears of the moment and our legal system struggles to mete out environmental justice in...