Raw Material Diversification: Benefits and Challenges

In a petfood industry career of over 40 years I have worked on diversification of petfood raw materials on both sides, with end-users and suppliers and both face challenges. One of the biggest challenges is a lack of resources (time, skilled people and facilities) and we see this picture on both sides. This exposes us to the challenge of building trust enabling a new supplier or ingredient to be brought on stream and understandably an end-user might be reluctant to make a change. There are strategies to help overcome this challenge and an &#;Open book&#; approach to data / knowledge sharing is a beneficial part of getting to a &#;Win-Win&#; position. Whilst this can be a challenge, ask the right questions!

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Emissions

As with the automotive sector, one of the chemical industry's primary environmental concerns is emissions from its manufacturing operations. These are regulated by federal, state, and local laws. Chemicals regulated under the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA's) Toxic Release Inventory (TRI) and other elements of Title III of the Superfund Amendments and Reauthorization Act of (SARA) are measured by total weight. Although total weight is appropriate for measuring continuous improvement, it does not take into account different production levels at various facilities. This metric would be more useful if expressed as emissions per mass of product. However, normalizing emissions in terms of mass of product would hide the impact of vertical integration (a key factor in chemical manufacturing) and would fail to account for the value of the product to society. As refinements to emissions metrics and other environmental performance metrics are made, it would be worth considering normalization against dollar value of product or, better still, dollar of value added to society. The latter is difficult to determine but would perhaps be more appropriate for sustainable-development discussions.

The chemical industry has developed a variety of metrics relating to "reportable releases." Through TRI, SARA requires companies to report on a wide range of chemicals, if minimum release quantities are exceeded.8 In addition to this mandatory reporting, another part of SARA9 provides for a wide range of voluntary data collection.

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Required reports such as TRI are used in the industry to learn about the performance of competitors. Equally important, TRI can be used to identify chemical companies that are having problems with their emissions and which may therefore be in the market for innovative products or approaches that reduce them. Reportable release data can be very confusing in the absence of additional analysis. Several companies, including Dow, DuPont, Monsanto, and Union Carbide, have developed simplified scoring systems that divide this reporting into three categories of significance related to human health. Metrics on all three categories are used internally within the companies for decision-making purposes. The most significant category is reported publicly as incidents (of releases) per year.

Another improvement in emissions metrics relates to predicting toxic dispersion or the potential for toxic dispersion. In the case of airborne emissions, some in the chemical industry are using models to predict the concentrations of pollutants that may occur over a given distance or area. Models are also used to evaluate the reliability, quality, or risk associated with a supplier or as a factor in assessing risks related to potential mergers or acquisitions. In addition, they are

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