Weyerhaeuser Company
Radio Show Transcript
THE ENVIRONMENT SHOW
PBS, Peter Berle, Host
Peter Berle: Coming up on this week's Environment Show, the Clinton
Administration is trying to trade bureaucratic hassle for environmental
protection. Can it work? Or are they giving the store away?
Last week, the U.S. Environmental Protection
Agency signed an agreement with the Weyerhaeuser Forest Products Company
covering their Flint River pulp mill in Oglethorpe, Georgia. Water use
will be reduced to less than half the industry average. Waste water and
chlorine discharges will be limited and Weyerhaeuser agreed to management
practices in its upstream forest that will enhance wildlife. In exchange,
some regulations affecting Weyerhaeuser were relaxed. The agreement was
a result of Project XL, which the EPA launched in 1995. John Kessler,
director of the emerging strategies division of EPA, describes how under
Project XL EPA has negotiated comprehensive pollution control agreements
with particular industries.
John Kessler:
Each XL project is an agreement with an individual facility, with local
citizens, with the state or local agencies, and with EPA. Each agreement
has really three key features. First of all, it provides a greater level
of environmental protection (what we call superior environmental performance)
relative to what would happen without Project XL. Secondly, it provides
a greater level of acountability to local citizens and to government agencies
so we all have a greater ability to see what is going on. Third, it provides
greater flexibility to the facility itself, or group of facilities, in
terms of how it achieves those environmental goals. So, its basically
superior environmental performance, greater accountability to citizens
for that performance, and greater flexibility in how that performance
is achieved.
A fundamental aspect of XL agreements is that citizen groups participate
in the negotiations and more data about the performance of the industry
is released to the public while the agreement is in force. Also, the agreements
cover things that are not part of air and water permitting processing.
And this is a feature of many of these XL projects. We are not only getting
reduced loadings of the things we do regulate, very often these agreements
incorporate things that we don't. In the case of Intel, one of the things
that the local community was concerned about, in addition to the things
that we do regulate, they were concerned about two other things. One,
water use and the other, set backs of the plant and basically, the centerpiece
of our agreement was an air permit and so we said, how do you put those
kinds of things in an air permit? And we negotiated an agreement that
includes quarter mile set backs for the plant, which is what the local
community wanted and that basically ensures that not only is the facility
not a net user of local water, it actually takes the discharge from the
local, publicly owned treatment works and uses that water as its base
product and then returns that water to the community in a form that is
purer than when it received it.
Peter Berle:
Kate Tate, who is the environmental communications manager for the Weyerhaeuser
Company, says the incentive for the company to enter into the agreement
was to get more leeway from EPA.
Kate Tate:
We were seeking flexibility in the area of environmental rules in several
areas. First of all, in how we achieve pollution prevention in our various
permitting -- for things such as developing new products, and performing
trials on those new products. We were seeking flexibility in reduced reporting
and record keeping and I think one other major thing is we were seeking
predictability in terms of permit requirements over the life of the permit.
Peter Berle:
Not all of the XL initiatives have resulted in agreements. In Minnesota,
the 3M Company negotiated an XL agreement through its state of Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency. The deal fell through though when EPA wanted
greater guarantees of continued improvement. 3M refused to be interviewed
by the Environment Show but Peter Larson, commissioner of the Minnesota
Pollution Control Agency, said that when the XL agreement collapsed, 3M
went back to the traditional permitting processes.
Peter Larson:
Most importantly for us was our goal of really trying to experiment, really
trust a company that at this site had provided incredible environmental
performance and used that as an opportunity to try to figure out a new
way of doing business. EPA didn't have quite the willingness to experiment
that we thought was appropriate, the project got tied up into some knots
that just couldn't be untied.
Peter Berle:
Environmentalist, David Hawkins, senior attorney for the National Resources
Defense Council sees Project XL as an attractive idea but says it needs
clearer definition.
David Hawkins:
The way EPA should proceed is to identify some key environmental needs
in the general area of improving innovation, maybe pollution prevention,
other objectives. What would the EPA like to see developed out there in
the private sector in order to make progress on the environment. And then
solicit a competition for proposals to address those needs and then select
the ones that are proposing to do the best job and if those peroposals
identify some changes in existing rules and regulations that are needed
in order to make the proposals a reality, then sit down and work out the
differences and try to make it happen. But I think what we have currently,
in the current crop, is the flip side. We have companies which have identified
existing rules and regulations that they don't like for one reason or
another. Some of the objections may be legitimate but basically, the process
has been the company identifies an existing set of rules and regulations
that it doesn't like and it says, well, we would really like to get out
from under these things. Lets see if we can come up with a package that
we can wrap around our basic objective of getting out from under the rules
and regulations that will be attractive enough to pass muster with EPA.
And because EPA hasn't set up any real criteria, the companies are tempted
to come in with as minimal a package as possible.
Regulatory reform is on everybody's agenda. Through Project XL, EPA is
trying to find better ways to manage all of the environmental impacts
of a facility using the promise of release from its own bureaucratic procedures
as a bargaining chip.