The Concept of Sustainable Development and a Cleaner Ukraine

Draft Concept of Sustainable Development of Ukraine Revisited

At long last, it was announced that, "based on the major ideas and principles declared at the Rio de Janeiro Conference of 1992, Ukraine deems desirable a shift to sustainable development that would ensure a balanced solution to social and economic tasks and to problems of leaving the environment and the potential of natural resources in good order for the current and future generations."

As is well known, the concept of sustainable development includes three aspects, namely environmental, economic and social. Underestimating any of these facets will lead to a distortion in this equilateral triangle and to a deviation from the overall strategy of sustainability. This strategy can only be implemented when the three tasks are fulfilled simultaneously.

The systems approach reveals strong interactions between the three factors of sustainable development. The sustainability will therefore be determined mainly by those parameters that affect at least two of the three factors.

The National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine suggested that an economic-environmental-social model be devised and employed for the purposes of the country’s sustainable development. This is a very complex and time-consuming approach that may not be usable at this time of industrial restructuring, privatization and other involved processes occurring in a collapsed national economy.

An alternative tactics is put forward, which is applicable at both national and regional level. Instead of mathematical modeling and optimization, it uses systems approach and decision theory techniques.

The environmental pollution in Ukraine has reached critical levels.

Vehicles, power plants, steel mills and nonferrous metallurgy works are the major air polluters. Pesticides are responsible for much of the harm done to human health.

Water pollution continues on a large scale. The Dnieper region is the worst affected among its counterparts in Ukraine. Here, the situation is disastrous because of a combination of energy-intensive industries, thermal power generation, and intensive agriculture, further aggravated by Chernobyl.

There is an urgent need to find feasible ways that would stop the ensuing depopulation in Ukraine, such ways to ensure survival that would work before the sustainable development concept has been implemented. In these times of a deep economic crisis, the economic and environment-related issues must be attacked simultaneously, in line with one strategy for a cleaner economy.

This would be a change from a policy of anthropogenic impact assessment to that of at-source abatement of pollution.

Such a program must be specific, realistic and not contradicting the idea of sustainability. It might be a program of cleaner industrial and agricultural production incorporating a systems principle of ascension from cleaner local units, mills, factories, and areas to a cleaner Ukraine to cleaner multinational regions.

What makes our approach rather different from the mainstream international cleaner production (CP) movement is the desire to abolish the dominating "black-box" techniques. Instead of regarding a production facility as no more than a given set of benign inputs and polluting outputs, we insist that one should seek the best ways to affect a prospective cleaner object within the "black box".

As the major principle of cleaner economy, the systems approach is taken that deals with perfecting any nature-technology system at the various hierarchic levels, from environmental pollution sources to consumers, and takes into account the interactions and mutual effects of all important components. This type of analysis will reveal relationships between the ways to improve processes and the challenges of risk management and nature conservation. The main task is therefore to harmonize the nature-technology relation and, ideally, to engineer high-performance systems featuring desired environmental characteristics at each hierarchic level, so that the favorable environmental background is not impaired and, where possible, even restored.

Following are the basic assumptions underlying the cleaner economy concept for Ukraine:

• At this time of a deep economic crisis, the economic and environmental challenges must be met simultaneously, in keeping with one strategy of cleaner economy.
• A move towards a cleaner economy must focus not on consumption, but rather on perfecting those entities that are actual or potential polluters.
• The success of a cleaner economy policy will be largely determined by the availability of professionals well trained in the theory and practice of "economy clean-up" and environmental management.
• No cleaner economy will be possible without creating a civilized environmental market.

These strategic principles determine some tactical measures for pursuing them. Such measures are applicable to any industry and include:

• no waste due to improved selectivity,
• neutralizing wastes directly at the origin, rather than at the exit,

• flexible technologies,

• recycling materials and energy,

• conservation of resources,

• waste treatment, etc.

These tactics must be combined with certain design and process engineering techniques, such as

• providing a considerable excess of the least hazardous agent,

• minimizing dwell times,

• recirculation of materials and energy via closed loops,
• concurrent reactions and product separation,
• introduction of heterogeneous systems,
• adaptive processes and apparatuses,

• increasing throughputs,

• multifunctional environmental facilities, etc.

For a cleaner economy to be affordable, an environmental market must be established and market mechanisms set to motion between all its interacting operators. Integration is necessary that would link researchers and developers of environmentally high technologies to designers of equipment to manufacturers to users. Professionals must be trained and further educated in the fields of industrial ecology and environmental management. Qualified consulting and assessing bodies are needed that would be capable of certifying environmental products, properly performing scientific, engineering and legal assessment, and winning public trust at the environmental market. Legislation is necessary that would give incentives to managers and entrepreneurs promoting cleaner production, ensure benefits to companies upgrading their production facilities to make them more environment-friendly, and stimulate development of an environmental market focused on high technologies, equipment, labor and services and having all proper attributes like competition, arbitration courts, commercial practices etc.

The latter paragraph is closely related to the idea of restructuring in the area of material production to be based on

• developing a socially oriented market economy that would guarantee a proper life standard for the population,
• cleaner production, minimizing environmental loads, material conservation, adoption of new types of activity grounded on environmentally safe technologies,
• making a more balanced economy by shifting from production of means of production to consumer goods, and
• environmental impact assessment and auditing for all economic projects.

The macroeconomic transformations rely on changes in the structure of production and consumption, mainly in industry. This necessitates:

• a more pronounced social orientation of industry to increase the relative importance of light and food-processing industries,
• an effective combination of industry branches keeping abreast of international requirements and meeting domestic needs,
• setting limits to raw material and semi-finished product industries,
• stepwise reduction of exports from primary and other material- and energy-intensive industries,
• increasing outputs of high-added-value products to facilitate effective utilization of domestic resources, and
• restructuring the production environment via introduction of recent scientific accomplishments, conservation of energy and other resources, implementation of waste-free and environment-friendly technologies, application of optimized power sources, waste treatment and utilization.

These points are common to the Draft Concept and to the cleaner production concept.

How could all that be funded? It would be ridiculous to suggest that comprehensive actions towards a cleaner economy might be supported by the miserable national budget. There is even less reason to believe that any down-to-earth effort to upgrade some specific facility and implement advanced technologies and state-of-the-art equipment might be funded from it. Furthermore, we can hardly rely on the assistance from the West, and nobody here believes in assistance not backed by economic interest.

What is to be done to make cleaner production profitable, as is the case in the West? One source might be those fines that are imposed on violators of environmental laws in Ukraine. However, no mechanisms of channeling this money to environmental investments are available so far.

All over the world, the environmental market is replacing punitive methods of environmental management and those environment protection agencies that are not capable of coordinating and managing cleaner economy projects.

Worldwide, the taxation and payments for resources and emissions are devised in such a manner as to make it more profitable for the manufacturer to resolve the environmental issues in-plant, rather than to shift them off to the consumer area. A combination of sanctions with economic incentives for a cleaner production will make the latter not a recipient from, but rather a donor to the government budget.

Yet even domination of a cleaner economy policy will not soon guarantee survival of the population under a deep economic crisis like the current one. The anthropogenic damage already caused to nature may prove too heavy and not lending itself to repair within the life span of one or even more generations.

An analysis of the man-production-environment system reveals that for survival of human beings the CP concept must be complemented by two more lines of action, namely

• adaptation of human body to life in adverse conditions, and
• utilization of life support systems.

The former approach implies development and implementation of biomedical and unconventional methods for prevention of ailments, adaptation and rehabilitation based on recent scientific findings and combined efforts of scientists, engineers, educators and managers under a degrading environment in Ukraine. These are the major lines to be pursued:

• setting up a tailored system of environmental education and training for the population in environmentally damaged areas, relying on the existing environmental education network and the media,
• research and development of adaptation promoters, immunogens and detoxicants, mostly of natural origin, processes and equipment for their manufacture and application practices,
• launching industrial production of adaptation promoters, immunogens and detoxicants, mainly from Ukraine’s domestic starting materials, and
• research and development of existing and new non-medicinal methods of health building and adaptation to anthropogenic loads, including ways to reduce immune reactivity of and risks to people subjected to adverse working environments, residing in heavily polluted areas or dealing with ionizing radiation and other negative factors at work.

The latter concept implies providing local life support systems for unfriendly environments. By now, Ukrainian scientists and engineers have developed a variety of processes for potable water treatment by adsorption, electrochemical oxidation, electrocoagulation, electro-coprecipitation, electrodialysis, electrofloatation, floatation, membrane techniques etc. Each family must get small units for water purification, air cleaning and removal of hazardous substances from the food as soon as possible, for it may take decades to introduce cleaner production on a national scale. Here, we should follow the example of Western business people who bring with them to Ukraine devices enabling a safe existence in this unfriendly environment.

More specifically, environment professionals in Dnepropetrovsk have offered a number of local CP projects. One of them is concerned with treatment of ash of the local steam power plant. According to Canadian experts, 32 elements may be recovered from the ash in addition to the residual coal, making the business of ash treatment highly profitable.

There have been projects to produce building materials from the fly ash collected directly at precipitation filters. Moreover, this material attracted international entrepreneurs who wanted to export it to Spain, most probably for purposes of extraction of some rare earth metals. It is regrettable that no local business people took interest in the idea, especially when in Dnepropetrovsk area there are defense industry giants like Yuzhnyi Engineering Plant and Chemppri with their expertise in high technologies, including recovery of valuable metals and fabrication of appropriate sorbents and equipment.

The steam power plant should become another site for an exciting project enabling a 2-fold reduction in the degree of flue gas cleaning while cutting the electric power consumption by a factor of 2 to 3. The new process that applies pulsed voltage to the precipitation filters has been successfully introduced at several other plants in Ukraine.

These and other projects were included in the draft program of cleaner production for the Dnieper region. Each item in the program is backed with engineering and economic analyses. For many of the projects, international partners and prospective investors are sought that may gain profit by cleaning our environment.