3M: Innovative genes start environmental protection first

3M, known for its innovation, is also a green pioneer. As early as 1975, the company adopted the concept of pollution control gain (3P for short) proposed by Chinese engineer Dr. Joseph T. Ling. From 2000 to the end of June 2008, 3M China Co., Ltd. reduced pollutants by more than 16,876 tons through 98 3P projects, saving more than 330 million RMB. In terms of social welfare and environmental protection activities, 3M has also made a lot of efforts, among which conservation of water resources and protection of water sources are the main directions. On the other hand, 3M, which has a wide range of products, has developed many environmentally friendly products for daily use, such as foaming additives that help save energy in refrigerators, and brightness-enhancing films suitable for LCD screens.

3M has a wide range of environmental protection practices, what kind of green concept does it hold? If innovation is in 3M's DNA, what does green mean in its culture? Let Mr. Yang Daxin, Senior Manager of Government Affairs Department of 3M China Co., Ltd. tell us the answer.

Enable environmental protection with innovation

Those who know 3M know that innovation is the DNA of 3M. What is the relationship between environmental protection and innovation?

Yang Daxin: Innovation and environmental protection are not available today. 3M's corporate culture includes respecting the value of employees, meeting customer needs, providing considerable returns to shareholders, and respecting society and the natural environment. Innovation is in the DNA of 3M, and 3M continues to introduce new products and solutions to help customers succeed. When it comes to the combination of innovation and environmental protection, the best example is Pollution Prevention Pays, Pollution Prevention Investment Plan, or 3P for short. The origin of this project dates back to 1975, when a Chinese engineer at 3M in the United States, Dr. Joseph Ling. Dr. Lin is well-known in the industry as "Mr. Environmental Protection". He has served as an environmental advisor to several US presidents. He is also the first engineer of 3M to devote himself to the environmental cause, and assumes the environmental responsibility of 3M's global operations. Dr. Lin believes that sustainable development is "a mechanism that we can use to create a better quality of life for ourselves and future generations." Under this premise, Dr. Lin proposed: "Pollution is a waste, and today's Waste will lead to resource shortages tomorrow.” Therefore, Dr. Lin formulated the 3M Pollution Prevention Investment Plan to encourage 3M employees who can both eliminate pollution and create profits for the company.

This concept was very advanced at the time. It made pollution prevention and control no longer simply a cost for an enterprise, but to obtain economic returns through pollution control.

How exactly does 3P work?

Yang Daxin: The final coordination of 3P is in the United States. It is not a strict production process, but a platform for absorbing environmental protection ideas and promoting environmental protection. China has a corresponding department in charge, called EHS, or environment health safety, which is composed of engineers responsible for environmental health and safety. Particularly good projects within the company will have the opportunity to receive EHS awards. 3P focuses on starting from the source of pollution, re-planning products, improving production processes, re-designing production equipment, and recycling waste. The 3P Coordination Committee, composed of engineers, production experts, and laboratory personnel, specially manages the "3P" plan, approves whether projects meet the standards, and rewards those projects that reflect technological innovation.

In this atmosphere, many employees have come up with many good environmental ideas. For example, people who have worked in factories are familiar with the wooden brackets (called shovel boards in the factory) for forklifts to load goods, but who has noticed that each shovel board has a net weight of 26 kilograms and is made of 32 kilograms of wood. Because the size of the shovel plate used in each factory is not universal, the shovel plate of the upper and lower factories cannot be recycled, which becomes a very high disposable consumable. Our company's Caohejing factory anti-corrosion coating product process engineer Chen Shunmei discovered this situation. She took the initiative to contact the upper and lower sides through the company's support to unify the specifications of the shovel, optimize the quality of the shovel, and promote the three-way shovel of 3M and 3M's suppliers and buyers. It can be recycled and reused. This alone can save the company 200-300 shovel boards every year, and 7,800 kilograms of wood can be saved according to the quantity of 300 pieces. Moreover, this project will save more wood as the sales of anti-corrosion coating products continue to expand.

Beyond the manufacturing process, specifically in product design and development, what are some examples of employees' suggestions being adopted and improved?

Yang Daxin: For example, scouring pads, which are often used by everyone, were originally developed using solvent-based adhesives, which inevitably produced a large amount of waste gas containing volatile organic substances during the production process. , the treatment of these waste gases requires a lot of energy. Later, 3M's R&D personnel successfully switched to water-based adhesives to manufacture scouring pads, which not only fundamentally eliminated the environmental pollution caused by waste gas, but also avoided the energy and fixed asset investment required to deal with these waste gases. The company derives direct economic benefits from it. For another example, one of our products, according to the original design, needs to be coated four times, but our technicians can produce products of the same quality by changing the product formula with only three coatings. Completely eliminate the pollution and energy consumption generated in one coating process.

When employees come up with these new ideas, do they know if they can be implemented?

Yang Daxin: I don't know. This requires the team to do follow-up research and development.

So how do you assess whether an idea is worth pursuing?

Yang Daxin: The part of energy saving and emission reduction is evaluated by the 3P committee. If the product formula is changed, whether the product itself can still be used, and whether it can still achieve the previous functions, depends on the R&D personnel to do it through a bunch of programs.

If an improvement requires collaboration across technology platforms, is there a way to make it happen?

Yang Daxin: 3M has an advantage, that is, there are quite a few technology platforms. Our unique advantage is that in so many technology platforms, we can cross and communicate with each other. In the United States and China, our R&D personnel have technical forums, and the organizing committee will select classic cases that have appeared in the past year to show. These cases may be about customer service or some experience in R&D. This kind of platform has both technical aspects and people-to-people communication, which is easy to create sparks. Like, the famous post-it example?

Yang Daxin: Yes, it was born out of this mechanism. The engineer was supposed to produce a super sticky glue, and he failed, he got something that didn't stick, so he put it in the archives. When he was introducing his experience, he was overheard by another engineer, and the engineer was troubled by the frequent falling of the small note in the songbook. The two technicians met, and a report was born. paste. This is a classic example of encouraging innovation and allowing failure.

If 3M's culture isn't like that, let you make a super sticky glue, and you make a non-stick one, forget it and leave, then they won't have a chance to meet. We often say that innovation is not limited to product development, 3P is carried out on all platforms.

Benefits the future with control

If improvements that are beneficial to the environment increase production costs, and at the same time customers are price-sensitive, what will 3M do?

Yang Daxin: If you can't sell it temporarily, you will endure it. We believe that as everyone's requirements for environmental protection are getting higher and higher, our environmentally friendly products will definitely have a market.

Different countries have different environmental protection standards. What will 3M do if it doesn't meet the standards in other regions, but China doesn't have restrictive terms yet?

Yang Daxin: We always perform with higher than local standards. 3P, as I understand it, pays itself means payment. The implication here is that it is cheaper to avoid the emission of pollutants than to treat them. In terms of cost, you pay in advance, but in terms of benefits, you avoid the cost of dealing with pollution in the future, and you will also get the benefits of adhering to environmental protection.

China's regulations are not that strict, and if you produce products that do not meet the standards, even if no one comes to arrest you now, there will be in the future. Some of our products will be exported to other countries. For us, the products delivered to customers must meet the company's strict environmental protection requirements and relevant export national standards, so that you can also guarantee the rights and interests of customers.

Have you ever had a problem?

Yang Daxin: There is an advertising film, and its original formula contains heavy metals, we don't know. After the product came out, it was evaluated by 3M's laboratory in the United States, and it was found that there was heavy metal cadmium in it. At that time, we also bought some raw materials from domestic manufacturers for processing. This heavy metal exists in a stabilizer used in it. Since we enforce the same standard globally, what shouldn't be available anywhere else, shouldn't be available here, so we reformulated the product right away.

Is it difficult to enforce such a high standard? Especially when it comes to managing suppliers?

Yang Daxin: In most cases, the supplier doesn't tell you that it has this thing in it, and the local regulations do not require it. Generally speaking, suppliers are not obliged to disclose the ingredients, so it is difficult to implement the standard.

However, checking suppliers is relatively easy for large companies. It is more difficult to maintain a unified quality standard and environmental protection standard globally. Business people are under the pressure of indicators and time. I know that the things that local suppliers give me can be sold locally, and other products in the market are also sold in this way, so it is difficult for us to make him not. Sell. But what a responsible company can do is to constrain suppliers, and they must meet strict quality standards and environmental protection standards before they can cooperate with them. Now many companies, including 3M, have green supply chain management. Everyone is so strict with suppliers. If suppliers want to survive, they must know what to do.

If a factory were to close, what environmental standards would 3M enforce?

Yang Daxin: We have a joint venture factory in Pudong, Shanghai. With the expansion of the city, there are mature residential areas in that place, and the subway is connected, so it is not suitable for a factory. We decided to close the factory. The department responsible for environmental assessment in the company asked a third party, a world-renowned environmental assessment company called ERM, to assess whether the local water and land of the factory were polluted and whether there were any environmental sequelae. We believe that the responsibility for environmental protection cannot stop only when the factory is closed, but to confirm that you have not caused any pollution to the place during the follow-up time of closing the factory. Later, ERM provided us with a follow-up report. After our factory was closed, the environmental indicators in the area where it was located were the same as the surrounding average.

Therefore, we take a responsible attitude towards environmental protection.

Using expertise to promote public welfare

In terms of social welfare activities, what environmental protection projects does 3M do?

Yang Daxin: This is mainly through cooperation with non-governmental environmental protection organizations. 3M likes to be a little forward-looking in doing things, and is especially interested in innovative projects that no one has done before. Let’s introduce some concepts proposed by the environmental protection projects we sponsor, such as the multi-benefit forest project, which means that simply planting trees cannot achieve the purpose of ecological balance, but to achieve a state of species diversification, and to combine the development and establishment of community forestry products The carbon sink mechanism can achieve the benefits of forests, communities and climate. We started to introduce the concept of carbon sink in 2004, which was relatively advanced at the time. The 3M foundation allocated 3 million US dollars for this project. The carbon sink project and the afforestation project are tied together. What we did in 2006 and 2007 was a freshwater protection mechanism. We established a pilot ecological compensation mechanism in the upper reaches of the Lijiang water source, and also cooperated with non-governmental environmental protection organizations.

What does 3M gain from doing these environmental protection projects?

Yang Daxin: During the course of our work, environmental protection organizations have given us a lot of influence. They can always come up with some new ideas and come up with new projects, especially ones that no one else has done. At Zhongshan Concert Hall in Beijing, we once sponsored a "zero carbon concert". By sticking 3M building film on Zhongshan Concert Hall, we reduced the use of air conditioners and carbon emissions. At the same time, we did some popularization of energy saving knowledge for primary school students who came to the concert.

Yang Daxin is the Senior Manager of the Government Affairs Department of 3M China Co., Ltd. When it comes to innovation and environmental protection, he has endless stories to tell.

In the environmental protection project 3M participated in, the staff of CI Shanshui Nature Conservation Center conducted on-site research in Rush Sea.