ABSTRACT
‘Pollution prevention pays.’ This was the slogan adopted by the US company 3M, one of the first large industrial corporations to take up the new preventive approach to environmental management of process wastes. 3M initiated its ‘3Ps’ programme in 1975 in order to find ways of reducing environmental costs during an economic recession. The experiment paid off. In the first three years, the savings from US facilities alone amounted to over $17 million, with a further $3.5 million coming from subsidiary companies overseas. At the same time, the company eliminated the equivalent of 75,000 tonnes of air pollutants, 1,325 tonnes of water pollutants, 500 million gallons of polluted waste-water and 2,900 tonnes of sludge per year. 1
