EPA & Manufacturing: One Man’s Passion

Tom Murray, who served in a key role as senior science advisor with the U.S. Environmental Agency (EPA), was at the forefront of many of the most significant environmental protections that the agency enacted, as well as in developing collaborative partnerships with the manufacturing segment.

 (Editor’s Note: Former EPA Sr. Science Advisor Tom Murray will keynote our Sustainable Manufacturer Network’s annual conference, to be held Sept. 26 to 27 in the Chicago area.)

It’s June 1971. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) had just been launched some six months earlier. President Nixon authorized it. News of the Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 that ignited as a result of discharged industrial oils and debris still is residual news (see Figure 1).

Only fragments of environmental laws exist. No comprehensive federal laws exist to prohibit, limit, or regulate the discharge of toxic substances, oils, and debris into the country’s water supply and oceans. No comprehensive federal laws exist to prohibit, limit, or regulate the release of toxic and ecologically harmful gases into the air. No comprehensive federal laws exist to protect the land from the indiscriminate use of pesticides and other chemicals.

Figure 1:
The Cuyahoga River Fire of 1969 that ignited as a result of discharged industrial oils and debris was a blazing red flag about human and industrial effects on the environment (left). Before the U.S. EPA was formed in 1970, toxic waste was allowed to be discharged into rivers, oceans, and other waterways at will.

Enter Tom Murray, biologist.

U.S. Environmental Protection Agency in Its Infancy: Eyewitness

“Being in the EPA at that time was really something to behold. Being a brand new agency, a lot of activities needed to get started to deal with all the different environmental statutes Congress was passing at the time, which were many,” Murray said.

“In the 1970s, a new environmental law was being passed almost yearly—from the Clean Water Act to the Clean Air Act to new pesticides legislation to the Ocean Dumping Act. And each time a new statute was passed, that meant an organization had to be formed within the EPA framework to deal with all the requirements of it.

“The early years were exciting, busy, even fun,” Murray continued. “I worked on those statutes early in my career. And it was real life. It was good stuff.”

Murray said that the agency’s origins began a decade earlier. “The agency was officially formed in December of 1970, but things started to really move in the early 1960s, in particular with the publication of Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring in 1962.” Widely credited with launching the modern environmental movement, Carson’s book was one of the first to probe humankind’s effect on nature.

“The Love Canal toxic waste dump disaster up in Niagara Falls in 1978 had a major impact on environmental consciousness (see Figure 2). Times Beach in Missouri later on in the ‘80s focused on dioxins. So a lot of things were driving interest in the agency.”

Figure 2:
Love Canal, near Niagara Falls in upstate New York, was the site of a toxic waste dump disaster that led to the formation of the Superfund program, which helps pays for toxic sites cleanup.

Water Protection. Murray was one of the few biologists by training in the EPA at the time. He applied his education to setting up water quality monitoring protocols and a biological organism database. “I was fortunate to be part of a lot of the fundamental water quality programs in the agency, especially state programs.

“We had a lot of fish kills occurring in the U.S., so we were working diligently with the states to develop ways to evaluate various toxic chemicals in the water. Back in those days, when you talked about water quality, you looked at things like the oxygen levels dissolved in the water; biochemical oxygen demand, which is the demand that pollutants put on the oxygen in water; turbidity; and suspended solids. That was it.”

Testing Protocols. Murray worked with biologists around the country to develop testing protocols to use, such as using daphnia, or water fleas, and other biological organisms to test for water toxicity. Water was drawn out of other bodies of water and put into tanks with organisms to measure the dose at which a percentage would die.

“That helped us to understand the toxicity and how best to deal with that problem,” Murray said.

Relationship of EPA with Manufacturing

Initially the relationship between industry and the EPA was “not too friendly” because all of the statutes had regulatory frameworks within them, Murray said. “At the time, industry really didn’t appreciate some of the environmental impacts of various things going on in the U.S. They didn’t like the fact that they had to change what they were doing and feared that there would be negative economic effects.”

In 1976, the Toxic Substances Control Act was passed, which allowed the EPA to develop a structure for evaluating different chemicals’ hazards and risks. “We were able to look at their hazards and exposure routes and come up with reasonable risk evaluations of them. Through that program, we were able to keep hundreds of toxic chemicals from even making it to market—and keeping them out of the environment.”

It was in the 1990s that pollution prevention really emerged, he said. “Instead of looking at a problem as it was coming out of the pipe or stack, the idea was to look at it as it was being developed, before it was used, so we could prevent things from happening in the first place.” A slew of concepts came out of that: basic recycling, green chemistry, green engineering, and design for the environment (now referred to as Safer Choice). “We worked with companies to design environmental considerations into their products rather than waiting for later consequences.

“By the ‘90s, the industries that had not been happy with us in the ‘70s were able to better understand that through pollution prevention efforts, they could produce products, make money, and be environmentally conscious at the same time.”

Public-Private Partnerships: Bridge Over Troubled Waters

It was at that time that dialogue opened about public-private partnerships. Murray was at the forefront of developing several of them: the Green Suppliers Network, the Economy, Energy, and the Environment framework, and the Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership (see Figure 3).

Green Suppliers Network (GSN) Germinates. The network stems from an act passed in 1990 called the Pollution Prevention Act, Murray said. In that statute, Congress authorized the EPA to work with businesses and encourage them to use pollution prevention practices.

Figure 3:
Tom Murray worked with manufacturers, communities, health care organizations, and many government agencies to form cross-organization networks to achieve results.

“We really cut our teeth in this area working with the health care industry. At the time, we were dealing with mercury, a neurotoxin that affects the nervous system—still a major environmental concern,” Murray said. Health care organizations, and specifically the American Hospital Association, had read an EPA report identifying medical waste incinerators as the fourth-largest source of mercury emissions into the environment.

“The medical practice’s mantra is ‘first, do no harm,’ and here they were releasing mercury into the atmosphere which then found its way into the food chain,” Murray reported.

“So EPA elected to do two things. One, it initiated the process to write a rule to regulate medical waste incinerators. At the same time, we in the pollution prevention area met with the American Hospital Association, American Nurses Association, and others and said, ‘Let’s see if we can work a pollution prevention solution to this.’ We literally sat down with doctors, nurses, and medical practitioners and found that by changing their purchasing behavior, moving away from mercury-containing devices, and changing waste management practices, we were able to get a 99 percent reduction in mercury emissions from the medical community. That was huge.”

That success encouraged more public-private partnering, Murray said.

Shortly afterward, General Motors contacted Murray and his team to understand more about the EPA’s pollution prevention approach. “GM, like other corporations at the time, was looking into how to green their corporation and supply chains.”

“We set up a protocol with our best pollution-prevention practices. We contacted the Manufacturing Extension Partnership [MEP].” MEPs, part of the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), a U.S. Department of Commerce agency, operate state by state, working with small and medium-sized companies to help them be more competitive.

“In the early years, MEPs focused on lean manufacturing, but they were starting to hear from their clientele about jumping on green. That’s why we formed the Green Suppliers Network. It seemed like a natural progression to combine lean and green.” The two organizations started working with GM and their suppliers, as a team, on the factory floor. The results were effective and immediate, Murray relayed.

“We would pick a process that was particularly troublesome. Through basic mapping and other evaluative tools, we came up with recommendations for improvements. Some were lean, some were environmental. It was a great hit.”

GM formalized the program by establishing another public-private organization, the Suppliers Partnership for the Environment, to solve environmental problems in the automotive supply chain. It is anchored by the major automotive corporations and their suppliers. The EPA is represented on it, although it can’t be a voting member.

Witnessing the successes in the automotive industry, companies in other segments wanted in (see Figure 4). “They said, ‘Let’s see if we can do it in our industry.’ We started working with the office furniture industry, pharmaceuticals, and other industries.” (Read “Steelcase shrinks water, energy, cleaners use in the wash” to learn more about how Steelcase’s participation in the GSN helped the manufacturer halve its water and energy consumption.)

Figure 4:
Steelcase’s metal components go through a pretreatment wash system, which is a counter-flow wash system that uses half the water, half the energy, a third of the chemicals, and a fourth of the labor that its predecessor did. Steelcase participated in the GSN.

Many manufacturers have adopted it. Some go through the MEP, while others contract out environmental and lean consultants, Murray said.

Economy, Energy, and the Environment (E3) Emerges. Utilities then became interested in the program. They started to use the approach and benefited from it. Murray and his staff conversed with a major Midwest utility company and devised an idea to modify the Green Suppliers’ Network approach into a community-based approach. “We did piloting in Texas and Ohio. That’s where E3 was born.” (Read “Crown Lift Trucks achieves zero landfill status” to learn how Crown Equipment achieved zero landfill through E3.)

The difference between the two is that GSN primarily is a lean and green supply chain approach; E3 is a community-based effort, Murray explained.

“Today, communities themselves want to become more sustainable. They want to be green communities because they want to attract new businesses, and sustainability is becoming a criterion for many businesses.

“We pulled people together. We involved mayor’s offices, economic development organizations, and the community. We included the Department of Energy, which has a national network of universities that do energy audits for companies. We reached out to the Small Business Administration for help with grants and other financial management services that they offer to small and medium-sized entities. We reached out to the Department of Labor to apply their workforce training programs. We involved the U.S. Dept. of Agriculture for rural areas, others in the EPA and the MEP program.

“We reached out to the field agents for all these organizations and got them together within the communities that showed an interest in this. We all had been working in the same area but not together.”

As a result, a manufacturing company can get help with a complete energy audit and financial management services and have access to layers of expertise. “The whole idea of the EPA working together and helping companies took a major step forward with E3.”

Part of the E3 effort is working with the manufacturing base, Murray said. “Not long ago, I had a chat with a small manufacturer in the Pacific Northwest who had gotten involved in E3 a couple years ago. I asked him if it helped his company. He said, ‘It worked great. We’re saving a million dollars a year.’ The almighty dollar will always be the driving force, but they were able to achieve a variety of different environmental benefits with the cost savings.”

Murray said he’s careful to refer to E3 as a framework rather than a program. “We want people to see it as a framework and use it to their own needs and best interests.”

Investing in Manufacturing Communities Partnership (IMCP) Initiates. Before leaving federal service, Murray was determined to develop one more initiative. “The White House came out with a program a couple years ago called IMCP. It’s very E3-like.

“The idea was to get communities around the country to band together and apply for a designation as an IMCP community.” Communities had to lay out a game plan involving multiple sustainability initiatives. A cross-agency team evaluated them and selected 24 communities as IMCPs.

“The communities are absolutely excited about being able to do this,” Murray said. In addition to the prestige of the designation, the communities may get some preference for federal grants, and they receive direct contacts in the federal community to access the resources they need.

Murray and a colleague composed an IMCP playbook to help communities looking to improve themselves to understand it and the pathway to sustainability.

“It’s sort of a brain-dump of all the people and programs I know.”

Industry and EPA: BFF?s

Murray said that all of those partnerships and activities turned the tide in the EPA’s relationships with manufacturers. “The EPA is still a regulatory agency, but so much has been done on the voluntary side over the last 20 years. It’s remarkable.”

As long as regulations are involved, there will always be suspicion and some industry organizations that want to argue about the regulations, Murray said. “That’s human nature, and it will go on and on. There still is fear that if they move to an environmental approach, they will lose money or go out of business. That’s a constant conversation. Once they go through the process and save money, they’re sold on it. But there is still a lot of suspicion out there in terms of environment vs. economics.

“The Pollution Prevention Act really got us a foot in the door to be a non-regulatory constituent within a regulatory agency. We have had the benefit of a lot of our administrators supporting us as we moved through these public-private partnerships.”

Reflections and Aspirations

Ironically Murray’s original aspirations were not related to environmentalism. He studied pre-med in college.

So not surprisingly, when asked what accomplishment he is most proud of, Murray cited the health crossover with environmental protection. “The mercury program that we did with the medical industry had such a dramatic effect. It is still operational.

“I like looking at my career with the EPA from a medical perspective because it’s very similar in terms of the effects on human health. So that’s why the passion is there.”

Facilitating the public-private partnerships was another source. “I pride myself in being able to pull people together and get decisions made.”

Although Murray and his colleagues accomplished a great deal during his tenure and he is officially retired from the EPA, that doesn’t mean he’s disconnected or no longer interested in the environment. There still are plenty of environmental problems to solve. He has launched a consultancy to continue the work he has invested so much time and effort in on a private basis.

“For me personally, I can’t retire from environmental issues. There is too much stuff out there that I care too much about and too many people I care too much about to let this drift behind me and become a guy on the beach selling umbrellas. I’m going to stay in the game and work on whatever I need to.”

Revising Old Standards. One area Murray believes needs improvement is revising some of the rules and regulations crafted in the EPA’s earliest years. “Some of the more progressive organizations out there pushing sustainability suggest that many policies and definitions that were originally written in the 1970s and not really revisited might actually be standing in the way of innovation and sustainability efforts.”

Environmental Effects on Human Health. “For some chemicals, like dioxins, mercury, and lead, the history and human health side of those issues has been fairly well-documented. You don’t play with mercury. We now know it’s a neurotoxin. Same with lead. Dioxin has its perils. We’ve gotten to where some people really do understand it. But a lot of medical professionals need to be schooled on the effects of environmental pollutants on human health.”

Murray said there is what he calls “a big gray area” where more study is needed to ascertain whether other human health problems have an environmental cause. “Are there things people suffer from that we can’t find a cause for that are rooted in the environmental area—and we just haven’t been able to connect the dots yet? There are a lot of immune deficiency disorders out there for which people can’t seem to isolate the cause. Perhaps it’s environmental; perhaps it’s not. I think there are a lot of unknowns out there we still need to deal with.”

Climate Change. “When you read the science, it tells you we are seeing the effects of climate change. Politically, people argue whether this is a natural phenomenon or whether we humans are causing it. To me, it doesn’t matter if we are causing it or if it is happening naturally. The fact is, it’s occurring. If there is anything we can do now to try to suppress the effects of climate change for future generations, I think we’re obliged to do that, whether it be cutting carbon emissions or just raising the understanding for younger people so they can weigh in.

“I’m not going to get into an argument with people about how real it is. We are seeing the effects—we might not see the worst of these effects for another 20, 25 years, but we are likely to see them. What concerns me as the father of seven kids and 11 grandkids is this.  We cannot pass this problem on to our grandchildren and say, ‘Well, by the time this becomes a real problem, we baby-boomers will be dead and gone.  It’s yours to deal with.’ That’s neither a right nor a fair message.

”If we are to be truly sustainable, we need to act now on what we can do now. Some will be easily doable, some will be extremely challenging, but we need to move in that direction.”

Global Perspective. Murray noted that one of the major changes from his earliest years with the EPA is that environmental topics are no longer just domestic concerns. “So it becomes a much more difficult conversation.

“Early in the EPA we had rivers catching fire; we had Love Canal; we had fish kills occurring all over the United States. The agency attacked all of these problems, and over the years we solved them. But our job is far from over. The problems we have today are no less grievous than we had in 1971. The difference is, they’re global. Developing countries are way behind us environmentally.

“Open and effective communication is always the right way to go when resolving these issues.”

To meet Murray in person and hear his keynote presentation, register for the Sustainable Manufacturer Network conference here.