• Cleaner production to minimise adverse environmental impact.
• Energy efficiency and the manufacturing sector contribution to Greenhouse effect.
• Recycling and other forms of waste minimisation.
• Promotion of 'green' products.
• National guide-lines for water, air and noise emissions.
• Hazardous waste disposal.

The Working Group has concluded that Australia's longer-term goal for manufacturing should be a robust, internationally competitive, export-orientated sector contributing to economic diversity and quality of life, based on environmentally benign products and processes and appropriately located and structured to obviate adverse environmental and social impacts.

The success of the proposed strategy will depend on the understanding and commitment of all players in the sector, requiring farsighted and imaginative adjustments to meet the goals of ESD.

As a major user of energy and natural resources the first step involves efficient use of labour, capital and natural resources.

The second step requires the sector to embrace a more comprehensive approach to ESD impacts, both positive and negative, on a range of social and environmental values.

A theme of the report is that an environmentally sustainable manufacturing sector must adopt a whole-life-cycle approach to resource management to achieve the desired shift to preventative action. This will involve moving as far as possible towards a closed loop system through:

• use of environmentally benign materials;
• design and adoption of cleaner production technologies and processes;
• design and production of environmentally benign products (e.g., fuel efficient motors, refrigerators that do not use chlorofluorocarbons, drink containers that can be recycled);
• more efficient use of energy and other resources so that resource use per unit of output is reduced;
• minimising the production of waste and avoiding generation of toxic waste during the manufacturing process; and
• reducing post consumer waste through better design and greater recycling.

Key recommendations:

Ninety-three recommendations in all are made by the Manufacturing Working Group. They cover principles for the development of ESD policies by all governments, the creation of an ESD ethos throughout industry and business, the careful evaluation of the evolving linkages between trade competitiveness and environmental policies in the international arena, R&D, location of new industry, pollution controls, waste minimisation and management, the conservation of biodiversity and ecological integrity, energy and global climate change, education and training, health and safety.

In a little more detail, the Working Group made recommendations that:

• any anomalies in the taxation of spending on environment-related plant and equipment, (including energy efficiency technologies), be removed and incentives provided for installation;
• employment impacts of ESD policies be assessed, taking into account effects at regional and national levels, and impacts on women, those of non-English speaking background, aboriginal and other disadvantaged groups of workers;
• best practice environmental management to become an industry goal;
• firms to increase the transparency of their manufacturing operations to improve community understanding and awareness;
• governments, in the context of the Special Premiers Conference, implement a national approach to environmental monitoring and reporting to ensure effective coordination of pollution controls, environmentally acceptable waste disposal and recycling;
• whole-life-cycle of products or processes, and disposal technologies, be part of product development;
• the application of the polluter-pays principle be pursued through greater use of market measures keeping social equity implications in mind;
• there should be a register of contaminated sites; application of the polluter-pays principle regarding clean-up costs; if the original polluter cannot be found and the current owner-occupier took reasonable measures to ascertain the status of the land and was unaware of the contamination at the time of occupation, they should not be liable. In addition there should be no liability where contamination of the land in the past was within the existing environmental laws and regulations;
• governments facilitate further recycling through encouragement of improved product design, better consumer education and support for local councils in kerbside collection and planning and operation of landfill disposal sites;
• conditional upon there being appropriate legislation and regulations phasing out the generation of intractable waste a high temperature incinerator for such waste be installed. This should be conditional on it meeting the highest international standards and subject to it meeting strict operational control and siting criteria; and
• individual companies and their associations have the prime responsibility for making sustainable environmental claims about their products but governments should: ensure trade practices and fair trading legislation and enforcement is adequate to control potentially misleading claims; collaborate with industry in developing education and information programs to increase consumer knowledge about the environmental impacts of goods and services.

Back...