Avoiding wastes and emissions in industry: experiences from Austria

Abstract Over the last two years Stenum GmbH has conducted projects to minimize industrial waste and emissions at source, working with several companies involved in textiles, machine building, circuit board manufacturing, the automobile industry and the printing industry. This paper presents our experiences from recent projects with three companies, with about 200 employees each, from the textile and machine building industries within the Austrian PREPARE project, in cooperation with the Institute of Chemical Engineering, Graz University of Technology and the Institute for Ecological Economical Research (IOW) in Vienna. The size and structure of these companies is typical of the Austrian industry. In all, the companies' hazardous waste could be reduced by at least 50%, and big savings arising from small technological or organizational changes could be realized. The reasons why these changes had not been found earlier were: lack of time on the part of staff; no systematic approach towards waste and emission problems; lack of information about which technologies are available in the market; and lack of clearly responsibilities for coping with environmental problems.