Marc S. Reisch
C&EN Northeast News Bureau

For chemical producers today, the battle cry is "Track us, don't trust us." The emphasis is on proving positively that the chemical industry's performance is up to snuff. But the problem is that the North American and Western European public by and large still do not believe that the chemical industry is anything but a necessary evil.

Two years into its second decade, the U.S. chemical industry's venerable Responsible Care program still has not significantly changed public perception of chemical manufacturers. Questions remain about the safety of many chemical products and the way the industry assumes the risks of manufacturing, transporting, and handling chemical products. Can Responsible Care usher in a radical change in public perception by emphasizing recent corporate health, safety, and environment goals?

The industry knows it is performing better today than it was 10 years ago. And some opinion leaders have a better view of the industry because of Responsible Care, too. Rep. Sherwood L. Boehlert (R-N.Y.) credits the Responsible Care program for "bringing major health, safety, and environmental benefits to tens of thousands of industry workers and plant communities." Boehlert is chairman of the House Committee on Transportation & Infrastructure Subcommittee on Water Resources & Environment. But the program has largely failed to do what it set out to do: convince the public that the benefits the chemical industry provides far outweigh any disadvantages.

This second decade of Responsible Care can continue to preach to the converted, or it can make a difference with the public. The industry wants credit for all the improvements it feels Responsible Care has helped advance by way of safer operations of plants, shipments of materials, and stewardship of chemical materials even after they have left the manufacturing plant.

Chemical companies intend to show that they are doing their best with performance improvement data and goals. Putting a public face on performance means tying it all in with two additional efforts. The first is an effort industry associations have made to establish third-party assessment programs to ensure individual company management practices square with Responsible Care precepts. The American Chemistry Council (ACC, formerly the Chemical Manufacturers Association) and the U.K. Chemical Industries Association (UKCIA) now have voluntary third-party programs in place. The Canadian Chemical Producers Association (CCPA) has a mandatory verification program.

The second effort seeks increasingly to tie the operational checks and balances of a systems approach that makes Responsible Care work together with the sustainable development movement. The latter movement attempts to link profitable corporate development of renewable, largely agricultural, resources to environmental and societal benefits.

John Elkington, chairman of London-based management consultants SustainAbility , says the chemical industry has its share of "excellent people who have done extraordinary things, but they simply don't recognize the scale of the problem they face." Elkington, who has advised companies such as Shell and BP, says the mistake that the chemical industry has made up to now is to attempt to prove its worth by telling people how the industry benefits the public. "People are not persuaded by that," Elkington says.

It's not that the public spends a lot of time thinking about the chemical industry, he says. But when the industry does come to mind, reports of accidents hurt public perception of the industry. Conversely, the industry would do better if it brought out new products that would benefit the public--the proverbial cure for cancer, for example. What the industry has to do in the face of public scrutiny, Elkington says, is to "enormously over respond" to public concern over issues such as global warming and greenhouse gases.

One way to respond to public concern is to make a corporate commitment to environmental solutions. Ford Motor Co. may have thought it achieved a public victory in the recent commitment to build more fuel-efficient sport-utility vehicles. The real victory, Elkington says, would have been a commitment to build a virtually nonpolluting hydrogen-powered vehicle. Chemical companies have to make similar radical commitments, he says.

It will take some doing to change public perception. Earlier this year, the European Chemical Industry Council (CEFIC) issued a summary of a survey of 9,000 Western European citizens that celebrated the end of a decline in the chemical industry's public image. Compared with surveys in 1994, 1996, and 1998, the latest survey showed "a small improvement." Compared with 1998, citizens' favorable views of the industry rose from 42% in 1998 to 45% in 2000.

Canadian chemical producers also have found public perception difficult to change. CCPA's 1999 survey of 1,000 Canadian adults showed that 40% of respondents had a favorable view of the chemical industry. A 1986 CCPA survey, conducted shortly after a Union Carbide plant accident that killed thousands in Bhopal, India, showed 43% had a favorable view of the industry.

Despite these public impressions, CCPA's recent survey--which was undertaken by Earnscliffe Research & Communications, Ottawa, Ontario, for the association--found the chemical industry's reputation improved significantly compared with 1986 in terms of the industry's ability to create jobs and growth, as well as in efforts to minimize risks to people, minimize risks to the environment, and correct chemical problems. There was no change in the survey's measure of the industry's honesty with the public. Only 18% of respondents felt the industry was excellent or good at being honest.

Brian Wastle, vice president of Responsible Care at CCPA, says a deeper reading of the 60-page survey report shows that the public is most worried about the prevention of chemical accidents and is concerned about the long-term health effects of the industry's emissions. That is why, he says, CCPA sees the Responsible Care effort as an adjunct to but not a replacement for "tough" government regulations. It's also why CCPA contributes to the global initiative to complete a battery of toxicological tests on high-production-volume chemicals coordinated by the International Council of Chemical Associations in concert with ACC, CEFIC, and other national chemical industry associations.

Changing public opinion is hopeless without a "massive" advertising campaign, Wastle believes. "So we are focusing our efforts on engaging Canadian opinion leaders." Those opinion leaders are often people who attend town hall meetings, write letters to newspaper editors, and who are generally engaged in the social process.

The CCPA survey also found many people fearful of the risks chemical operations posed to the environment, human health, and human safety. When it comes to the environmental information that the industry can employ to advantage, the report suggests that "results show that hard targets for environmental improvement are the strongest approach." CCPA's 1998 Reducing Emissions Report sets some targets--among them a 79% reduction in members' chemical emissions per unit of product by 2003 compared with 1992 levels. In 1998, members had already reduced emissions by 69%.

The survey also reinforces the value of third-party verification of plant Responsible Care operations, he says. CCPA's Responsible Care in Place Verification program requires member companies to bring in a panel of environmental activists, local citizens, and industry experts every three years to evaluate a company's endorsement of Responsible Care goals and objectives. "The Responsible Care program is not a voluntary program. Voluntary implies starting and stopping at will," Wastle points out. And the verification procedure in place now requires not only that companies show systems are in place to enforce Responsible Care, but that companies are ethically committed to Responsible Care.

As forward-looking as CCPA is, its Responsible Care program still does not encompass the radical commitments to change that consultant Elkington calls for. Given the diversity of chemical companies that associations represent, it is more likely the associations will help along incremental changes and much less likely that associations will formulate plans for radical change. For instance, the U.S.-based ACC has called upon members to commit to performance improvement goals. According to Richard Doyle, ACC vice president for Responsible Care, the organization's 190 member companies and 60 partners responded in the fall of 1999 with a total of 450 performance goals. While those goals overlap to a degree from company to company, many are specific to the company submitting the goals, Doyle says.

ACC plans to make the company-specific goals public this October. "We'll put the database on the Internet so people can contact individual companies" and learn more about specific company plans to achieve performance goals, Doyle promises. But, he adds, "We've elected not to have overarching goals for ACC at this time. We'll stick with a focus on promoting ACC's vision of no accidents, injuries, or harm to the environment."

Performance goals are a fairly new feature of Responsible Care, so they are not now a formal part of ACC's own four-year-old brand of voluntary third-party verification: Management Systems Verification (MSV). The program incorporates industry, plant community, and public-interest group representatives in a three- to four-day evaluation of a company's procedures to comply with the Responsible Care codes. Only 86 of ACC's 190 members have completed at least one MSV to date, and another 17 are scheduled for the remainder of 2000 and into 2001. But as part of the MSV process, most "companies discuss their environmental performance and their goals to show that the system works," Doyle says. And he acknowledges that the MSV process is developing in ways that would more formally include an evaluation of performance.

ACC's Public Advisory Panel--made up of government, environmental, consumer activist, and public-interest group representatives--is encouraging more emphasis on performance. In an open letter contained in ACC's Responsible Care Report 2000, the group writes: "We see MSV and community-based performance tracking as complementary and interrelated. A link to performance is crucial to making MSV credible to the public. While MSV assesses internal processes for fostering good environmental, health, and safety performance, performance tracking--developed in conjunction with the community--should demonstrate the actual effectiveness of these practices."

Individual companies have in some cases asked verifiers to consider performance and goals for the future in the MSV they conduct of the company. That was the case for the MSV conducted for Dow Chemical in March 1999. "The bottom line of Responsible Care is performance improvement," says R. Stephen Rose, Dow Chemical's global Responsible Care coordinator. Including performance criteria in the MSV "helped to provide feedback on whether our goals for 2005 were appropriate," Rose says.

Dow first set 2005 employee health and safety targets in 1996. The company's 2000 Public Report Update shows that it was on target in 1999 to reduce process safety incidents 90% from a base year of 1994. It recorded 43 incidents that each caused more than $25,000 in damages due to fires, explosions, and significant chemical releases from processing equipment in 1999, down from 123 in 1994. The company's goal is to reduce such incidents to 12 by 2005. In other cases, the goals can highlight failures. For instance, on the way to achieving a goal to reduce breaks in and spills from process equipment and facilities, the company recorded 914 incidents in 1999, which was down from 1,363 in 1994 but above the target of about 590 for 1999. Dow's 2005 target for this type of accident is 136.

However, the variety of schemes and methods companies use to measure and set performance standards and goals can be bewildering. A few can involve more universal standards. Companies can track emissions of chemicals listed on the Environmental Protection Agency's Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) . The components of the list have changed over time, so it is not a consistent measure. In other cases, companies can track injuries in a consistent fashion based on Occupational Safety & Health Administration standards.

St. Louis-based Solutia , for instance, uses both TRI data and OSHA data to track performance, says Garth F. Fort, Responsible Care coordinator. Bayer Corp. uses an electronic database to track all the audit standards to which it subscribes (such as OSHA 1910.119 Process Safety Management and ISO 14001 Environmental Management) to come up with one management system protocol, Responsible Care Manager Barry Stutts says. Ciba Specialty Chemicals has a global goal to reduce energy use per pound of product 10% by 2001 from a base year of 1998, a spokeswoman says. Ciba also depends on a proprietary software package to track performance worldwide.

Some companies set themselves stretch goals that, although short of consultant Elkington's call for radical solutions, are nonetheless notable. DuPont, for instance, has recently set itself goals that promise to implement both sustainable development and Responsible Care objectives. Seeking to reduce its "environmental footprint," the company plans to derive 25% of revenues from nondepletable resources by 2010, says Edwin L. Mongan, manager of environmental stewardship. DuPont also plans to depend less on fossil-fuel energy through its goal to derive 10% of global energy needs from renewable energy.

In the U.K., the chemical industry is on target to deliver on its 1997 promise to improve energy efficiency by 20% by 2005 from the base year of 1990, says Stuart Aaron, UKCIA Responsible Care manager. Like ACC and CCPA, the group has linked sustainable development with Responsible Care in its latest statement of principles. And while a self-assessment program is mandatory for all UKCIA members, a third-party examination of Responsible Care commitments is not.

A new voluntary program, announced earlier this year, is a certification and not a verification program, Aaron explains, because it involves professional examiners. "Certifiers will only assess management systems," Aaron says. "We are training and registering assessors who will be the eyes and ears of the community," he adds.

Jacques L. Busson, head of Responsible Care for CEFIC, says no pan-European certification is in place that is similar to what UKCIA has started. In most European countries, self-assessment is the rule, although Austria does have a third-party auditing program in place to verify management systems, he says.

However, Busson says that European consumers' attention has shifted from concerns over manufacturing plant operations to concerns over chemicals used in consumer products. "People are more confident in our ability to manage plants. It's a sign of the success of industry/community councils," he says. So the industry group's focus is now on high-production-volume chemical toxicological screening.

The environmental solutions envisioned in sustainable development could move the industry toward the radical solutions consultant Elkington calls for. Meanwhile, Responsible Care has set the groundwork to rebuild public confidence, although others, such as the ACC Public Advisory Panel, suggest the industry has to do more. Actually tracking performance in a consistent and understandable manner is a start. And both ACC and CCPA acknowledge that setting long-term performance goals and meeting those goals will help to bolster public confidence.

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