Cleaner production is a preventive, company-specific environmental protection

Environmental protection

Environmental protection is a practice of protecting the environment, on individual, organizational or governmental level, for the benefit of the natural environment and humans. Due to the pressures of population and our technology the biophysical environment is being degraded, sometimes permanently...

 initiative. It is intendend to minimize waste

Waste

Waste is unwanted or useless materials. In biology, waste is any of the many unwanted substances or toxins that are expelled from living organisms, metabolic waste; such as urea, sweat or feces. Litter is waste which has been disposed of improperly...

 and emissions and maximize product output. By analysing the flow of materials and energy

Energy

In physics, energy is an indirectly observed quantity. It is often understood as the ability a physical system has to do work on other physical systems...

 in a company, one tries to identify options to minimize waste and emissions out of industrial

Industry

Industry refers to the production of an economic good or service within an economy.-Industrial sectors:There are four key industrial economic sectors: the primary sector, largely raw material extraction industries such as mining and farming; the secondary sector, involving refining, construction,...

 processes through source reduction

Source reduction

Source reduction refers to any change in the design, manufacture, purchase, or use of materials or products to reduce their amount or toxicity before they become municipal solid waste.- Synonyms :...

 strategies. Improvements of organisation and technology help to reduce or suggest better choices in use of materials and energy, and to avoid waste, waste water generation, and gaseous emissions, and also waste heat

Waste heat

Waste heat sometimes called Secondary heat or Low-grade heat refers to heat produced by machines, electrical equipment and industrial processes for which no useful application is found. Energy is often produced by a heat engine, running on a source of high-temperature heat...

 and noise.

Examples for cleaner production options are:

• Documentation of consumption (as a basic analysis of material and energy flows, e. g. with a Sankey diagram
  Sankey diagram
  Sankey diagrams are a specific type of flow diagram, in which the width of the arrows is shown proportionally to the flow quantity. They are typically used to visualize energy or material or cost transfers between processes.-Application:...
  
  )
• Use of indicators and controlling (to identify losses from poor planning, poor education and training, mistakes)
• Substitution of raw materials and auxiliary materials (especially renewable materials and energy)
• Increase of useful life of auxiliary materials and process liquids (by avoiding drag in, drag out, contamination)
• Improved control and automatisation
• Reuse of waste (internal or external)
• New, low waste processes and technologies

One of the first Europe

Europe

Europe is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...

an initiatives in cleaner production was started in Austria

Austria

Austria , officially the Republic of Austria , is a landlocked country of roughly 8.4 million people in Central Europe. It is bordered by the Czech Republic and Germany to the north, Slovakia and Hungary to the east, Slovenia and Italy to the south, and Switzerland and Liechtenstein to the...

 in 1992 by the BMVIT (Bundesministerium für Verkehr, Innovation und Technologie). This resulted in two initiatives: "Prepare" and "Ecoprofit".

The "PIUS" initiative was founded in Germany in 1999. Since 1994, the United Nations Industrial Development Organization

United Nations Industrial Development Organization

The United Nations Industrial Development Organization , French/Spanish acronym ONUDI, is a specialized agency in the United Nations system, headquartered in Vienna, Austria...

 operates the National Cleaner Production Centre Programme with centres in Central America

Central America

Central America is the central geographic region of the Americas. It is the southernmost, isthmian portion of the North American continent, which connects with South America on the southeast. When considered part of the unified continental model, it is considered a subcontinent...

, South America

South America

South America is a continent situated in the Western Hemisphere, mostly in the Southern Hemisphere, with a relatively small portion in the Northern Hemisphere. The continent is also considered a subcontinent of the Americas. It is bordered on the west by the Pacific Ocean and on the north and east...

, Africa

Africa

Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...

, Asia

Asia

Asia is the world's largest and most populous continent, located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres. It covers 8.7% of the Earth's total surface area and with approximately 3.879 billion people, it hosts 60% of the world's current human population...

, and Europe.

See also

• Cradle to Cradle Design
• Energy conservation
  Energy conservation
  Energy conservation refers to efforts made to reduce energy consumption. Energy conservation can be achieved through increased efficient energy use, in conjunction with decreased energy consumption and/or reduced consumption from conventional energy sources...
  
  
• Environmental management
  Environmental management
  Environmental resource management is “a purposeful activity with the goal to maintain and improve the state of an environmental resource affected by human activities” . It is not, as the phrase suggests, the management of the environment as such, but rather the management of the interaction and...
  
  
• Environmental Quality Management
  Environmental Quality Management
  Environmental Quality Management, Inc. is an environmental engineering and remediation company headquartered in Cincinnati, Ohio that has been active in providing environmental remediation support in response to terrorist attacks, the space shuttle disaster, superfund site cleanup, hazardous...
  
  
• Green design
• Industrial ecology
  Industrial ecology
  Industrial Ecology is the study of material and energy flows through industrial systems. The global industrial economy can be modeled as a network of industrial processes that extract resources from the Earth and transform those resources into commodities which can be bought and sold to meet the...
  
  
• ISO 9001
• ISO 14001
• Pollution prevention
  Pollution prevention
  Pollution prevention ' describes activities that reduce the amount of pollution generated by a process, whether it is consumer consumption, driving, or industrial production...
  
   (or Source reduction
  Source reduction
  Source reduction refers to any change in the design, manufacture, purchase, or use of materials or products to reduce their amount or toxicity before they become municipal solid waste.- Synonyms :...
  
  )
• Sustainability
  Sustainability
  Sustainability is the capacity to endure. For humans, sustainability is the long-term maintenance of well being, which has environmental, economic, and social dimensions, and encompasses the concept of union, an interdependent relationship and mutual responsible position with all living and non...
  
  
• Total quality management
  Total Quality Management
  Total quality management or TQM is an integrative philosophy of management for continuously improving the quality of products and processes....
  
  
• Waste minimisation
  Waste minimisation
  Waste minimization is the process and the policy of reducing the amount of waste produced by a person or a society.Waste minimization involves efforts to minimize resource and energy use during manufacture. For the same commercial output, usually the fewer materials are used, the less waste is...
  
  

Literature

• Fresner, J., Bürki, T., Sittig, H., Ressourceneffizienz in der Produktion -Kosten senken durch Cleaner Production, ISBN 978-3-939707-48-6, Symposion Publishing, 2009
• Organisation For Economic Co-Operation And Development(OECD)(Hrsg.): Technologies For Cleaner Production And Products- Towards Technological Transformation For Sustainable Development. Paris: OECD, 1995 Google Books
• Schaltegger,S.; Bennett, M.; Burritt, R. & Jasch, C.: Environmental Management Accounting as a Support for Cleaner Production, in: Schaltegger,S.; Bennett, M.; Burritt, R. & Jasch, C. (Eds): Environmental Management Accounting for Cleaner Production. Dordrecht: Springer, 2008, 3-26

External links

• A special issue of the Journal of Cleaner Production that focuses specifically on Zero Emissions
• ECOPROFIT Plattform
• Cleaner Production Center Austria Official ECOPROFIT Trainings & Distribution Center
• Pollution prevention in China
• National Cleaner Production Center Programme
• Cleaner Production by sectors
• PIUS: Produktionsintegrierter Umweltschutz
• Prepare
• UNIDO NCPC Programme, including lessons learned, and contact to National Cleaner Production Centers
• Journal of Cleaner Production