Germany’s special shade of green

MAINZ, Germany, Aug. 1, 1999 - Germans are proud of their Green credentials — their stringent recycling regime, the codes and ordinances that regulate everything from the size of a washing machine to the emission of a petro-chemical combine. The Green Party broke into government last year as part of Chancellor Gerhard Schroeder’s coalition. But can an environmental friendly nation also keep pace economically?

Ecological modernization may sound like a strange, contradictory term. In Germany, however, its all the rage. With the environmentally minded Greens in key ministerial positions here, the government has undertaken an unprecedented campaign of incentives and regulation to ensure that Germany, at least, cannot be blamed for fiddling as Earth burned.

The 1997 Kyoto environmental accord called for a reduction of greenhouse emissions that many industrialized nations appear unlikely to meet. The overall goal - a reduction of 25 percent by 2008, has been criticized as arbitrary by some western critics and in the developing world many view the entire process as an effort to prevent their ascent into the industrialized world.

But if the issue has lost its appeal in some places, in Germany its on the front burner. This year, Germany’s environmental minister introduced a plan billed as “ecological tax reform” which aims to phase in large tax cuts to firms that introduce new standards with and cleaner practices.

The government also has pledged to help companies clean up their production processes, to exploit alternative fuels, institute more recycling and develop a new “three-liter-car” - a vehicle that would travel nearly 220 miles on a gallon of gas.

But with Germany’s economy only now emerging from several years of stagnant growth, there also is enormous pressure to ensure such measures don’t impact productivity in German industry and thus exacerbate joblessness.

The idea of harmonizing ecology and economy is hardly new. For years in Germany, manufacturers of household appliances and Germany’s large car industry have been leaders in efforts to eliminate hazardous components and byproducts from their production lines.

A decade ago, when scientific reports first showed that clorofluorocarbons, or CFCs, contributed significantly to ozone depletion in the upper atmosphere, the giant Siemens conglomerate was moved quickly to cut by half the amount of CFCs used in its refrigerators. Only a few years later, BMW decided to replace vehicle parts that contained CFC. By 1993, all new BMW cars were CFC-free. The German government committed to a total ban of CFCs in 1994 two years ahead of the deadline agreed to by industrialized nations in the Montreal Protocol.

Cleaning up the Autobahn
Germany’s auto industry had once lagged in relation to the rest of the economy when it came to environmental concerns. With Germans at least as smitten with their powerful vehicles as Americans, there was a real reluctance in the 1980s to do anything that would reduce the power, speed or performance of German cars.

Thus, well into the 1990s, a majority of Germany’s fleet lacked catalytic converters and ran on relatively filthy leaded gasoline.

The public backlash at acid rain in the late 1980s and advances in performance changed that. By the mid-1990s, led by AUDI, German car manufacturers began to study ways to minimize fuel consumption and to “optimize the lifecycle” of vehicles.

The key, in AUDI’s opinion, was vehicle weight. Soon, AUDI introduced its “Space Frame Technology” (ASF), making liberal use of aluminum where there once was heavier steel. With relatively little change in production, AUDI found it could reduce the weight of vehicles by 35 to 45 percent. The practical effect: its A8 line of cars drove an extra 70 miles for each gallon of gas.

There is a down side, however. The lighter frames take more energy to build. AUDI acknowledges this, but argues that the higher production emissions are more than compensated for in the course of the car’s driving life.

Catching up
After a slow start, Germany’s car industry has moved out in front on environmental issues. With a record 3.75 million cars registered in Germany this year and pressure from the government to clean up their act, the emphasis has shifted. All German car companies, including DaimlerChrysler, Volkswagen and OPEL, established special environmental departments and research groups.

Most of these firms have low-emission-prototypes already, some powered by hydrogen and others with hybrid engines. But the focus in Germany at the moment is the “three-liter-car” - the car that will run over 200 miles on a gallon of gas.

Green party politicians say the manufacturers are not moving fast enough. But automakers point out that, with German drivers still committed to the unlimited speeds of the country’s Autobauns, the performance of the fuel saving cars won’t make it on the open market. They see incremental improvements in fleet mileage as more realistic - and more competitive, too.

“Better results can be achieved if car manufacturers reduce the emissions of their entire product range, which we have been doing extensively in the past years,” said Manfred Heller, General Manager for Environmental Protection at BMW. “Even though our goal is to optimize ‘Clean Energy’ production and products, we are at a stage where we can only achieve marginal improvements in emission reduction and in some production sectors we have already reached reduction limits.”

Other challenges
Germany industry’s efforts to clean up production have spread beyond the country’s borders, too.

Wolfgang Lohbeck, who has been highly critical of German industry in the past, concedes that strides have been made.

“In the course of spreading environmentally friendly technologies throughout the world,” Greenpeace’s Wolfgang Lohbeck says, “German industry has brought its own enormous dynamism to the process.”

A good example of this philosophy exists in the appliance industry. Both Bosch and Siemens Household Appliances (BSH) recently set an ambitious goal: the worldwide elimination of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs), which are not ozone-depleting, but like carbon dioxide, implicated in climate change.

BSH’s European plants have consequently been using pure hydrocarbons for some years. When building a new production plant in Brazil, BSH completely excluded the use of hazardous HFCs right from the outset.

Factories which have been taken over by BSH were upgraded to the new standard and in new plants the hydrocarbon technology is already integrated at the process planning stage.

“The crucial point was not simply the German ‘good’ example, but also the fact that the companies concerned had incorporated the new technologies in their business philosophies,” Lohbeck said.

Andy Eckardt is an NBC producer based in Germany.