Three yeras ago, California biologist Sam LaBUdde took a job as a cook on a tuna vessel. While on board, he videotaped images of dolphins caught and killed in fishing nets along with schools of yellowfin tuna. His footage lent a new fervor to an issue that had been discussed by environmentalist for years.

IN april conservations, and consumers were rewarded with a positive industry reponse. First, Pittburgh-based H.J Heinz Co. which owns the star Kist brand of tuna, announced it would stop buyinh tuna caught in nets that also trap dolphins. Tha same day, Indonesia's Van Camp Seafood Company, Which markets Chicken of the sea, and Bumble Bee seafoods, Inc., owned by a company in Thailand, folowed suit. The policy experts contend, wil substantially reduce the estimated 100,000 annual dolphin deaths caused by tuna fishing.

The tuna industry's move is one of several recent coporate efforts to preserve marine life. Other companies are working to reduce the flow of toxic chemicals into our waters. Solvary & Cie, the Belgian chemical company, has developed special sodium carbonate bricks that can help to restore ecological balance to lakes destroyed by acid rain. And Sandoz, the Swiss chemical company, has worked hard to rehabitilate the Rhine, which had been contaminated by about 30 tons of agricultural chemicals which flowed into the river following a fire at one of its warehouse in1986.

Other companies are recycling pollutants or manufacturing products considered environmentally safe. West Germany's Henkel Corp. is selling phosphate free detergents. when released into the waterways, phosphates stimulate the growth of algae, which contaminate the water supply. And the Proctor and Gamble Co. is reducing the amount of molecular chlorine used in the manufacture of its disposable diapers and other items. Chlorine, which is used to whitten and purify paper, generally enters rivers and reservoirs through pulp-and paper-mill waste-water and thourgh groundwater that has seeped in from landfills.

Other companies are focusing thier efforts on pollutabts that hve been discharged into bodies of water. One method is recycling sludge-sewage and other industrial waste that has picked up sand, grit and other organic material and is then piped to the rivers and seas. At Hoffmann La Roche in Nutley, New Jersey, solvents which were formerly discarded as sludge are now used to run generators and boilers in the company's facilities.

In large sludge-recycling effort,water authority has contracted Enviro-Gro Technologies to help clean up Boston Harbour. For years, the Massachusets Water Resources Authority (MWRA) simply treated sewage and then pumped it into the harbour, where slugde built up and fouled the water. Enviro-Gro will now process the slugde and sell it as fertiizer, with half the revenues going to the MWRA in order to help defray the cost of recycling.

In similiar effort, Dr. German Mueller of the Institude of Sedimentology at the University of Heidelberg recieved a Philip Morris Research Award for his work in developing technology to extract heavy metals, especially cadmium, from sludge and reused in a wide variety of industrail applications.

Increasingly, borad evironmental approaches are taking hold. The Royal Dutch Shell Group has commissioned several environmenatal research projects in Malaysia, including a study of marine life around offshore drilling platforms and another on the bioegradation of crude oil in the Sabah and Sarawak marine environments. The company has also worked to redtore coral reefs near its Tanbango refinery in the Philippines.

Edgar S. Woolard, Jr., chaiman of Du Pont, sums up the corporate challenge as well. "INdustry has a checkered past of successes and failure in environmental matters, and as a result manufactureres have been painted many colours in recent years," he says." That will have to change. In the future we will have to be seen as all one colour, and that colour had better be green."

Kevin McKinney

Source : Newsweek 21 May 1990

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