Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency

This note documents the transition of Michael Braungart from Greenpeace activist to international consultant in industrial ecology. In the process of forming a consulting company, the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency, Braungart poses a challenge to SETAC, an international scientific organization, on the methodologies of assessing product and process life cycles. Excerpt UVA-E-0146 Rev. May 9, 2013 ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION ENCOURAGEMENT AGENCY Michael Braungart, a chemical engineer and professor, had good reason to feel a sense of accomplishment. He and his consulting company, the Environmental Protection Encouragement Agency (EPEA), had earned a ringing endorsement at the Economy and Environment Conference in June 1997. This major environmental conference had been hosted in Mainau, Germany, by the high-profile, nonprofit German Environmental Aid Association (Deutsche Umwelthilfe) and attended by some of the world's largest companies, such as Lufthansa and Unilever. Braungart had been present in two official capacities at the conference. First, he presented one of the key consulting tools that he and the EPEA had developed over several years. The tool was called a “Sustainability Index.” It was one part of a challenging methodology that Braungart was putting into practice at companies that hired the EPEA. Second, he was mentioned by Albin Kalin, managing director of Rohner Textil, a company that had developed and was selling a compostable furniture fabric constructed from a nearly emission-free production process. Kalin had worked with the EPEA in order to make sure the fabric and his dye and weaving facility were in compliance with environmental sustainability criteria. Kalin had presented some of the main results of this endeavor. The endorsement had come at the end of the conference from the commentator, the Right Honorable John Gummer, England's secretary of state for the environment in former Prime Minister John Major's government. Gummer had labeled the compostable fabric, Rohner Textil, and praised the EPEA as “the only existing example I have seen that embodies the spirit of Agenda 21.” Gummer was referring to the international document developed at the 1992 Earth Summit at Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Agenda 21 was on Gummer's mind, as the next week he was headed to New York for Earth Summit II, on the five-year anniversary of the Rio conference. Gummer undoubtedly wanted to carry a strong message of European progress to the conference. . . .