Cleaner Production in Australia: Revolutionary Strategy or Incremental Tool?

Abstract

Cleaner Production is a generally applicable preventive environmental management strategy for industrial operations. Numerous companies have benefited from Cleaner Production: its application is most often cost-effective and leads to profitable innovations in processes, products and services. This article reviews the development status of Cleaner Production practices and policies in Australia. Comparisons are made with experience abroad—mainly from Europe and USA—in order to draw lessons and assess outstanding Cleaner Production opportunities in Australia. The experience with the implementation of Cleaner Production in Australia turns out to be positive. Substantial reductions of different environmental impacts have been achieved in at least several dozens of companies representing key sectors of Australia's economy. And the implementation of the Cleaner Production projects made good business sense for those companies. It is, however, argued that most of what has been achieved should be regarded as incremental improvement rather than revolutionary change or innovation. Because of this incremental approach, Cleaner Production runs the risk of being underused, missing opportunities for technology innovation and commercial success. Australia can take a quantum leap forward in the next couple of years, provided the dominant marketing strategy for the promotion of Cleaner Production is sharpened. It will also need to be supplemented with a technology-forcing strategy to foster the development and implementation of innovative Cleaner Production technologies and practices.