“Clean Production”

As pollution is a serious global issue, an environmental protection initiative called “Clean Production” was formed and is slowly being dispersed to different parts of the world through international companies.

Clean Production by definition is “any practice which eliminates at source the use or formation of hazardous substances through the use of non hazardous chemicals in production processes, or through product or process redesign, and thereby prevents releases of hazardous substances into the environment by all routes, directly or indirectly.” This means that companies must not only be concerned with the production and consumption of their products, but they should also be concerned with the entire life cycle of the materials used.

Clean production has four key principles which should be integrated in order to achieve its goal:

1.       Precautionary Principle

-   This principle requires that companies should take no chances and be sure that their products will be safe and that the chemicals that they use will never be harmful to the society in any way throughout its life cycle.  They should prove that there will be no harm and no safer way to proceed.

2.       Preventive Principle

-    “Prevention is better than cure” is often quoted for a reason. Companies must use safer chemicals and eliminate hazardous chemicals, including though substitution, with effective non-hazardous alternatives instead of launching campaigns against pollution.

3.       Public Participation Principle

-   This initiative will be a waste if people won’t know anything about it. So it is necessary to disseminate information about emissions and releases of hazardous chemicals, as well as “clean production” itself in order to hasten its adoption.

4.       Holistic Principle

-   Clean production is an integrated approach to production, constantly asking what happens throughout the life cycle of the chemical or product.  It is necessary to think in terms of integrated systems, which is how the living world functions. Otherwise, new problems may be created by trying to solve old ones.

Given that Clean Production encourages the protection of biological and cultural diversity, the Philippines could definitely adapt to this initiative and benefit well from it. This will help promote sustainable development and help with the country’s problems regarding surface and ground water pollution through the adoption of cleaner production technologies. Studies and experiments were already carried out in the Philippines and have proven that indeed, the country will benefit a lot from this kind of technology.

The Philippines, however, is lagging behind its neighbouring countries such as Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan when it comes to the implementation of this new initiative. This is probably due to the fact that information about Clean Production isn’t as well circulated as in other countries. If only Filipinos would only get enough knowledge about Clean Production, then companies here might be more concerned with the effects of their products to our environment, especially to our water.

 - Steven Joseph Torres

Sources:

http://www.cleanproduction.org/library/Factsheet1_Clean_Production.pdf
http://www.cleanproduction.org/Home.php