Environmental Issues
The Greening of Whitford
When we published our corporate brochure in 1996 (well before “green” became a fad and then morphed into an important movement), we featured a chapter “The Greening of Whitford”. Following is what we said:
“Historically, high-performance coatings such as those we manufacture have been made with solvents, which have been a crucial ingredient in achieving the performance of such coatings.
“But solvents are ‘volatile organic compounds’, and ‘VOCs’ contaminate the atmosphere.
“Many years ago, recognizing the damage to the environment caused by pollutants, and acutely aware of what we were contributing to the damage, we began to look for safer alternatives to our solvent-borne products (one of the reasons we spend so high a percentage of our sales on Reseach & Development). This search gave us the jump on the industry.
“Today, we make environmentally acceptable analogues for most of our product lines, with hundreds of ‘green’ formulae available to our customers. The VOCs of these coatings are less than (and, in some cases, significantly less than) the limits permitted by the toughest environmental legislation found in any of the markets in which we sell.
“With five manufacturing facilities around the world*, it is our policy to apply the most stringent environmental regulations to all of our locations, no matter how less demanding the local laws may be.”
* Now eight manufacturing facilities around the world.
Many years have passed since we codified our view on the environment, and we see no reason to alter anything we wrote. It remains our policy to comply with the strictest environmental regulations in all the countries in which we do business, as well as to maintain our on-going search for new and better ways to minimize pollutants as we improve our products and create new ones.
We maintain fully staffed departments of regulatory affairs in the offices in which we manufacture. As the worldwide head of this department recently reported, “Our record of environmental compliance is flawless”.
We intend to keep it that way.
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