Green Consultant Boosts Efficiency and Profits

“Being environmentally responsible is not just about meeting the regulations and complying with the laws anymore, but that you’re actually setting the bar for other industries in your sector, and that you’re using good environmental management to expand your business and to make a profit. As an environmental consultant, I help you find a new way to innovate and become the most efficient, to squeeze every dollar that you can out of what you’re earning,” says Molly Long, president of A.W.E. Consulting.

Long helps companies identify where they can improve.

In Part 1, we spoke with Long about her experience with the laws, rules, and regulations of environmental management. Part 2 discussed her role as an environmental auditor for ISO 14001 compliance. Part 3 focuses primarily on Long’s job as an environmental consultant, helping businesses become highly effective and sustainable.

BPGL: With the inauguration of President Obama, the nation is turning toward green jobs both to help us out of this economic slump and to improve the environment. As an environmental consultant, you’re already engaged in a green job. What does this part of your job entail?

LONG: As a consultant, I help my clients assess what they are doing right, what they are doing wrong, and help them figure out where they can improve. Plus, I offer any service that another environmental consulting or engineering firm can offer, such as permitting, training, compliance assessments, and environmental remediation projects.

BPGL: So, if I were to hire you as an environmental consultant for my business, what exactly would you do?

LONG: I would come in and clean up your environmental management methods, whether they are based on ISO 14001 or not. I would make sure you’re compliant with laws and regulations. But much more than that, I would help you go beyond compliance and turn what you’re doing environmentally into something positive for your business.

When I consult, I ask questions like, “How do you use your resources?” “How do you make sure that your people are doing the right job and that they’re competent to do it?” Every time an employee has an error, it costs you money. So it’s about error-proofing and looking at ways to improve, streamline, and increase efficiency. And that makes a business truly sustainable.

A well-managed company has qualified people doing the right jobs.

When it comes to consulting, I also believe in that age-old philosophy that it is better to teach someone to fish than to just give them a fish. Many consultants are looking for ways to ensure they can continue to consult. But at the end of the day, a consultant is not a member of the organization and does not share in the accountability for its success. I feel it is crucial for people to have the tools they need to be successful going forward without a consultant. This is a pretty unorthodox philosophy for a consultant.

BPGL: How are A.W.E.’s consulting services different from traditional consulting groups?

LONG: Traditional environmental consulting focuses on how to keep a client “out of trouble and under the radar for regulation.” This is based on the wrong-headed concept that meeting the law means your business is operating as well as possible. The ultimate goal in this philosophy is being able to get out of having to obey the law at all — it has nothing to do with doing what is sustainable.

For example, fluorescent bulbs have mercury in them, so they have the potential to pollute when they are disposed of, and they are regulated by the EPA. There is a market for recycling the mercury from bulbs, so rather than disposing of them and letting the mercury go into the ground, the mercury can be recovered and reused. Some lighting companies came out with “green” bulbs. These lights still have mercury in them, but it is better protected, so that the mercury will supposedly not come out when the bulb is broken. As a result, direct pollution for mercury releases from broken bulbs is reduced.

BPGL: That sounds like a great innovation.

LONG: It is a great innovation, but it has an unintended consequence. Now people throw these “green” bulbs in the trash, and the mercury isn’t recovered. It’s a disposable mentality driven by the desire to avoid regulation, rather than the desire to do what is environmentally sustainable. The problem is that now the market for recovered mercury is weakened because people would rather throw away their bulbs than separate them for recycling. The company that chooses to dispose of their bulbs rather than recycle them may think they’re saving money related to compliance and disposal costs, but in reality, everything becomes more expensive, because we have to use fresh resources to make the bulbs rather than using recovered mercury.

Companies must get away from disposable thinking.

This is just one example of where “disposable thinking” has led us astray. In order for a business to be truly sustainable, they have to look at environmental management as more than just a cost center. Instead of thinking about minimizing disposal costs, they need to expand their concept of what is a “product” and help develop and expand the markets they can sell to. The philosophy here might be best expressed as “one man’s trash is another man’s treasure.” I believe it is crucial for consultants to be able to use their knowledge and experience to help their clients think outside the box so they can have an environmental edge over their competitors.

BPGL: What you’re doing is in line with what we profess at Blue Planet Green Living, which is that you can help to save the planet and be profitable at the same time.

LONG: You have to make money; otherwise it’s not sustainable. You can’t just do the right thing one time and leave it alone. It has to be something that you do over and over again, and that has a pathway for improving on what you’ve already done.

BPGL: So, for example, as you improve your business and streamline operations, you also create less carbon.

A.W.E. works with companies to make them efficient and sustainable.

LONG: You create less carbon. You create less waste. You put fewer pollutants in the water. You use fewer raw materials. You use less energy. There are incredible metrics related to how sustainable businesses not only protect, but improve, the environment. But people don’t know how to tap into them, because they are focused very narrowly on compliance or the performance of an individual process.

A lot of companies never make the connection between what they’re doing to protect the environment and save energy costs and their global carbon footprint or the positive impact on their local community. I’m there to help them see that bigger picture, how everything plays together. I help them learn how to recognize the aspects of their operations that are truly “green.”

I’m a wildlife ecologist by degree. And ecology is the science of how everything interacts with everything else. There’s no one thing that you can do that’s not going to affect other things. So you have to look at everything in the system, because everything that you do inside the system is going to have far-reaching effects throughout that system. That’s my approach as I’m looking at the bigger picture.

BPGL: As a consultant, how do you motivate companies to consider complying with ISO standards?

LONG: I strongly encourage adopting the environmental management style described in the ISO 14001 standard. The standard is actually quite simple. The thousands of regulations out there can be distilled into simple concepts. And that’s what the standard does. One of the biggest problems that we have when folks start doing the standards, is that they approach it from a regulatory mind frame, like, There are going to be these thousands of requirements we’re going to have to do!

But the reality is, it’s very simple. You do whatever is efficient. When something’s not working, you recognize what’s not working. You don’t just correct the symptoms that are visible, but you actually try to discover the root cause of why it did not work, and fix it so that it doesn’t happen again. You prevent the recurrence of the problem.

We want to make the environment better than it was when we got here.

BPGL: There are so many laws and regulations, and it seems new ones are created all the time. That’s got to be a huge problem for companies.

LONG: If you’re doing environmental management now because you’re reacting to a new law or laws and regulations that apply to you, how do you figure out what you need to do? Let’s get that out of the way and figure out who’s going to do what, when is he going to do it, and whether we’re doing it right or wrong. Then we can work on setting up things that will help you get to the point where laws and regulations are moot, because you’re so far beyond that now, and compliance is not really an issue for you.

It’s a matter of moving forward so that you can get away from those thousands and thousands of individual laws that apply to you, and work on the basic concept of, We’re not going to pollute. We’re complying with everything we need to. And we can get better. We’re always getting better. Those are the three basic things that everybody wants to work on. I’m trying to distill all of these thousands of individual laws they’re setting, with individual parameters for everything.

It really comes back to one simple thing, which is that we don’t want to pollute. We don’t want to make the environment worse than it is. And if we can, we want to try to be of benefit to the environment, not just to protect it, but actually to be a benefit to it, to make it a better environment than we found when we got here.

NOTE: Long, of A.W.E. Consulting, Inc. writes about ISO 14001 in her blog, Show Me the Shall. She will be teaching an introductory ISO 14001 course March 11-12 in Chicago. For more details, or to register for the training, visit A.W.E. Consulting or email molly@aweconsulting.com. Customized training sessions are also available.

Part 1: Red Tape, Regulations, and Environmental Crimes

Part 2: ISO 14001: Comply with Laws, Prevent Pollution, Continually Improve

Part 3: Green Consultant Boosts Efficiency and Profits (Top of Page)

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)

Related Post:

My 5: Molly Long, A.W.E. Consulting

Red Tape, Regulations, and Environmental Crimes

“When I went to Ireland recently,” says environmental auditor and consultant Molly Long, “I sat in a pub with a pint of Guinness while being lectured to by an average citizen of Dublin about what environmental terrorists we Americans are. He didn’t know we were environmental consultants. It was a really interesting perspective. He said we do a terrible job of protecting the environment.”

Long is a former hazardous waste inspector for the state of Indiana. Today she is in high demand as an ISO 14001 auditor and an environmental consultant, two services she provides through A.W.E. [Agriculture. Wildlife. Environmental.] Consulting, Inc. As an enforcer of laws, an environmental auditor, and a consultant, Long has worked extensively with a wide variety of businesses, industries, and government groups. In this interview, she brings broad perspective to the topic of environmental laws and regulations.

Molly Long, Environmental Auditor and Consultant

We interviewed Long from her office in Michigan City, Indiana. What follows is the first of a three-part interview.

BPGL: What was your response to the criticism that businesses in the U.S. are environmental terrorists?

LONG: I wanted to listen, to hear what that take was. I didn’t want to pollute it with my own opinion. It was an eye opener. They thought our environmental laws were weak and shabby and didn’t do a good job of protecting the environment. And when I think back on it, they’re right. Our environmental laws have not done a good job of protecting the environment. But they’ve done a great job of confusing everybody.

Businesses constantly struggle to consistently comply with the laws and regulations – forget about trying to improve the environment. Our environmental laws are so complicated, we can’t really even tell if they are effective or not at protecting the environment.

BPGL: Are you talking about red tape?

LONG: Yes. Red tape is one of the biggest environmental tragedies we have. Having been an enforcer of laws and regulations, I can tell you that red tape is probably 90 percent of the problem. People can’t dig through it, and they can’t put proper resources toward physically protecting the environment because they are too worried about what kind of records they need to keep. Besides creating a red tape nightmare that kills more trees than it saves, we have actually weakened true environmental protection through our environmental laws because they are designed to manage a lowest common denominator for environmental protection that applies across a broad spectrum of regulated businesses. This results in some industries being under regulated and others being regulated out of business, or choosing to go somewhere else.

If you want to look at the causes of economic collapse, one of them is losing our industrial base. There is no country that can become strong and have a good, sound economy without an industrial base. For example, the steel companies are heavily regulated and cause a lot of pollution, but we need the goods that they make. We should be working closely with them to make sure we are regulating the right things environmentally and still allowing them to operate in a sustainable way. The very environmental laws that govern us are part of our problem.

BPGL: More of a problem than causing endless paperwork and confusion?

LONG: Yes, because often we aren’t regulating the right things, things that can have major environmental impacts. Remember the coal ash incident that happened recently in the Tennessee Valley? Coal ash is not regulated. We’ve taught all industry and business to focus only on those things that they can get in trouble for, not on those things that they should be taking care of for the simple reason that they’re bad for the environment. Just like with any other legislation, lobbyists and influence groups all come into play in the making of environmental laws. When I was a regulator, we had a saying: “Regulate by the part per billion and exempt by the ton.” Coal ash is one of those things that gets exempted by the ton.

We were raking mom and pop organization over the coals for miniscule amounts of pollution, (and sometimes putting them out of business) while the big guys could dump literally tons of polluting substances because the material was exempted from environmental regulation. It was exempted because the big guys had the big bucks to pay for lobbyists to get them the regulations they wanted Meanwhile, the big guys are allowed to dump tons and tons and tons of this stuff, because it’s not regulated. What that means is, some lobbyist got in there and got what they wanted. The problem with laws and regulations is that they are subject to that very kind of influence. On one hand that sounds evil, but on the other hand, you can’t blame industry, because they are trying to find a way to operate and stay in this country.

Laws and regulations covering industry are not as strict in some parts of the country.

Another confusing issue is that laws and regulations covering industry are not as strict in some parts of the country. Let’s say you’re in Alabama and you really want to bring industry down there. It’s the hot spot right now — all the South is the hot spot for industry. They’re giving every incentive they can think of to get industry to come down there. And let me tell you, the laws and regulations in Alabama are not the same as they are in Maine, or California, or Iowa, or Chicago. They’re going to do what they can to get the business down there.

BPGL: Does that mean they’re going to weaken their restrictions in the South? How can they do that?

LONG: The rules are set up to where the EPA is the federal baseline, and you can’t be weaker than the federal baseline. But the federal baselines are trying to cover 50 different states and the U.S. protectorates, as well, so we have lots of different scenarios, and the [federal] rules are going to be very broad and general.

States are authorized to run their own EPA programs, and they’re expected to make more stringent regulations based on the more specific environments in the state. There are lots of different contexts for the type of environment that needs protecting. Think of a business that operates in the middle of the desert versus a business right next to a wetland versus a business in the middle of a forest versus a business in the middle of a neighborhood.

BPGL: What are some examples of those different contexts?

LONG: I’ve seen some steel mills that are in the middle of a major city, and I’ve seen others that are out in the middle of nowhere. They have very different environmental concerns. The one steel mill that’s in the middle of the city is basically in a funnel, surrounded by multi-million dollar homes. They are scrutinized by the community every second of the every day, and people are concerned about their property value in addition to the environment. At this mill, everything it has is under cover. Their scrap yards are covered, so they can minimize noise and dust. And they have certain loading procedures for their ladles so that they don’t make noise.

But something that’s out in the middle of nowhere, and nobody’s around to hear or see, that’s a whole different story. Another steel mill has no human neighbors, but is very committed to protecting thousands of acres of forest nearby. It’s all about context. There’s no regulation or set of regulations that can cover every situation in a way that’s right for everyone. Instead of issuing laws based on theoretical science and the interests of lobbyists, regulators should be working closely with industry to determine solutions for environmental protection that are tailored to the business and the environmental context it operates in.

BPGL: With so many different contexts, how well do the regulations work?

Steel mill regulations are often made by people who have never worked in a steel mill.

LONG: One of the biggest problems we have in this country is that we’re piling all these regulations on different industries, and the regulations are made by people who don’t necessarily understand how things work on the level that they’re regulating. In other words, somebody is making regulations for a steel company who has never worked in a steel company. They don’t know how it functions, and that’s a problem because they can’t make the regulations match very closely to what needs to be done.

We’ve already got hundreds of thousands, if not millions and more, different regulations, and it varies from state to state, sometimes from city to city, sometimes from one area of a city to another area of the city, depending on the size of the city. We’re regulating all these fine distinctions, especially when it comes to something like air. We have all these complicated air regulations. But at the end of the day, you can’t subdivide air. You can’t say, This portion of air is clean, and this portion right next to it is not clean. It just doesn’t work that way. As my father says, that’s like having a no peeing section in a swimming pool.

BPGL: That brings me to a comment we heard from a family in Iowa. Their pool service company said that the acidity of their swimming pool had changed in the last few years because of the increasing number of coal plants in China.

LONG: Exactly. Weather patterns are worldwide. Air is certainly affected by weather, and weather is affected by air. What we do here is affecting what happens over there, and vice versa. We can’t just say, “You make your air as clean as possible, and everything will be okay.”

We end up pushing a lot of our problems away instead of dealing with them. We say, “Well, we just won’t have this industry here next to us, because it will be bad,” instead of working together to find a solution that is sustainable for everybody. It’s not sustainable if you’re putting all the nasties somewhere else. Then you’ve just made a problem for somebody else, and you’ve greatly increased inefficiency, greatly increased cost, greatly increased all the problems that go with it.

Another big problem with environmental regulation in this country is that it sets a very adversarial tone between industry and government. It sets up a fear among business owners: I could go to jail if I do this wrong! That’s the way our justice system works, but it doesn’t stop the bad guys from doing wrong – it just makes the average law-abiding citizen scared and confused. Then to top it off, the EPA does not offer any assistance or even a consistent interpretation of their laws. This causes many people to accidentally violate laws simply because of ignorance of them or misunderstanding the law’s intent.

That certainly doesn’t mean there aren’t people who don’t willfully violate environmental laws. When I was an inspector, there were people who were sent to jail through my inspections, and they deserved it. There were some really bad actors.

BPGL: Give an example of an environmental crime that got someone sent to jail.

Dumping hazardous wastes is illegal.

LONG: An electroplater was going out of business and was dumping all his chemicals down the drain to the city. The city traced it back, shut off his sewer access, and called the state to investigate. By the time I got there, he was trying to sell his wastes and extra chemicals and trying to leave the state, possibly the country. In his parking lot, he was burning what he couldn’t sell. We also found out he had made a deal with the city to sell his polluted property (they didn’t know) to use for a children’s activity center. Based on my investigation and those of other state and federal agencies, he went to the federal pen.

Another company was picking up people’s waste and claiming to properly dispose of it. But it turned out they were dumping it in various fields around the county. We went to their residence to investigate and discovered a shed full of bulging drums of unknown material, which led to a big clean-up operation. These people also went to prison.

But that isn’t really the end goal — that only upon threat of death or going to jail that you should do something. You should do things because it makes sense to you and for the community, and because it helps your business. That’s the way a business has to work or it can’t succeed. A country where businesses can’t succeed is not going to have a strong economy, and countries with bad economies can’t do a good job of protecting the environment.

Part 1 of 3

Part 1: Red Tape, Regulations, and Environmental Crimes (Top of Page)

Julia Wasson

Blue Planet Green Living (Home Page)