SPHERE+case "Sumovera Finland"
1. Introduction
The "Sumovera Finland" SPHERE+case is in some respects rather extreme among the 20 SPHERE+cases.[1] One of the dimensions I refer to is the competence profile of the change agent(s).[2]
Competence profile of the change agent
Based as they are in the Laboratory of Concrete Technology at Helsinki University of Technology (HUT) the change agent(s) obviously represent an extremely high technical competence of the industry where the substitution is to take place. They are also very close to the technical leaders of the industry in educational background, industrial problem-solving paradigm etc. This can be illustrated by the fact that the technical leader on the largest pilot site as well as a central figure in the Sumovera Finland advisory group (representing the Concrete Industry) both share the educational background in Civil and Environmental Engineering.
As compared to other change agent(s) in the 20 SPHERE+cases who are often social actors (i.e. Environmental/Consumers organisations /Unions/Non-aligned partners) the Sumovera Finland change agent(s) are probably less used to be expected to put questions about natural and work environments on an equal footing with questions of technical efficiency and economic productivity.
The special profile of the Finnish change agent(s) is a consequence of the fact that the Finnish team was seen as a part of an internationally designed project and larger project team from the very point at which Sumovera got going. Therefore the Finnish change agent(s) can be seen as the technical wing of an international change agent. Since Sumovera Finland has a distinct life of its own - which is what I've focused on - I will however offer some interpretations of the pros and cons of "the Engineering bias" of the Finnish team.
Since it pertains to a group that is often rather cautious I'd like to state at the very beginning of this report that the attitude, to the Sumovera project, of the technical leaders in the companies that were singled out as pilots seems enthusiastic. The enthusiasm might partly be due to a timing that happened to be exceptionally good. Sumovera Finland activities happened to peak at a point in time when there were signs of an environmental awakening in the building and building materials industries. Sumovera could thus be seen as a pre-warning.
Weak interest from social and public actors
In a Nordic perspective the Finnish building materials industry, which can be seen as "the target group" in a wider sense, has woken up to environmental challenges rather late. And Finnish Unions - especially the Building Workers - have been bogged down with other problems than those of red and green (working and natural) environments. Their overriding problem is unemployment levels unheard of in Finland since the second world war.
Legislative and administrative bodies for red and green environments are - again in a Nordic perspective - often rather traditional/cautious in their problem solving strategies. The principle of substitution has for instance not been made a part of Finnish legislation in spite of repeated suggestions in that direction.
Problems in diffusion phase?
The weak interest from actors outside the industry <-> HUT nexus and the Sumovera Finland focus on some rather sophisticated building materials' companies might cause problems in the VERA diffusion phase. In the introductory phase the weak interest from the most likely VERA supplier (Raisio) was a problem until recently.
My worries about the diffusion phase does not imply that the VERA proportion of the market is likely to be stagnant in the coming years. Quite the contrary since it is likely that the leading industry actors that are in the pilot group will raise their VERA proportion dramatically in the near future. This will affect the overall Finnish VERA proportion significantly since the major players are involved.
The aim of my remark is rather to point to the risk that companies that are SME:s even in a Finnish context might be left behind. And that also non-industry environmental actors except for HUT might be rather untouched by Sumovera. But to make such remarks of course implies an agenda that is unreasonably tough given the resources of Sumovera Finland.
If my hunch about coming problems in the diffusion phase proves to be correct it might however be worth considering symmetry-forming follow-ups to future Sumovera/Subsprint-type DG XIII-projects.[3] By this I mean projects where national competence advantages are reversed. In those projects the change agents with technical bias such as the one for Sumovera Finland would be drastically strengthened in social and legal areas in the symmetry-forming follow-up project and vice versa for the national change agents with social/legal bias.
Research methods
The principle fact finding method used in this SPHERE+case was deep interviews made with a number of important actors.[4] The main route to access was through the Sumovera Finland project researchers/change agents but I also gained access to Finnish enviro-actors through old contacts among Swedish employers and unions. From my diss. work I had valuable contacts in the Swedish industry for technical applications of vegetable oils. A rep of the Union for EU Building Workers (EFBWW a partner in the int'l Sumovera project) as well as old academic contacts in Finland were also helpful. In brief the main interviews were:
-The head of the Sumovera Finland team and the Sumovera Finland researcher
-Three representatives of target group companies in the pre-cast concrete industry - each interview done in connection with on site visits to production lines where pilot studies had been going on for a while
-The product-group manager within Raisio which is the Finnish company that is most promising as local supplier/producer of VERA
-A central rep of the Finnish Industry Association for building materials. He was central in the project design for Sumovera Finland since he provided the Sumovera Finland team with industry contacts making pilot tests possible
-A regional ombudsman for the building and building materials workers
-A professor of Economics who has written extensively on economic strategies based on advanced environmental demands
-A head of lab at the Finnish Institute of Occupational Health
-A senior advisor at the Finnish Ministry of Environment with deep expertise on the history of and possible future for the substitution principle within Finnish chemical and environmental policies
Two of the interviews had to be done via interpreters (Finnish -> Swedish, Finnish -> English).
As preparation for the majority of the interviews mentioned above I did a number of telephone interviews with Swedish suppliers and users of release agents. Outside the SPHERE+ and Sumovera projects the most important background to this SPHERE+case SuV Fi report is however my studies of enviro-innovation in the cutting liquid market reported in Swedish in chapters 8 and 18 of my dissertation on The enigmatic time pattern of Environmental Innovation.[5]
2. The substitutions
In the Sumovera Finland case there are at least two background stories worth telling. The second gives a historical Nordic context for a broader group of substitutions of mineral oil for vegetable oil in technical applications.
The substitution in an EU context of the mid 1990:s
First to be briefly mentioned here is however the story familiar to persons who have taken an interest in the EU DGXIII Sumovera project. On a general level the substitution is well caught in the full project name: SUbstitution of Mineral Oil based concrete mould release agents by non-toxic, readily biodegradable, VEgetable oil based Release Agents in the construction industry.
The necessary qualifications to the general description, the basic technical, economical environmental, and social facts as well as the EU-reasons to support the Sumovera project are given in the reports from the definition phase of the Sumovera project.[6] The reports that I have in mind are from 1995/96. Since most readers of this SPHERE+ report are supposed to be familiar with that material only very few repetitions will be made here:
-Sumovera is a TTP (technology transfer project) and as such i.a. aiming to help SME:s (Small and Medium-sized Enterprises) to strengthen their innovative capacity
-Three main reasons to support bigger market shares for VERA:s (higher VERA proportions) are: Environmental sustainability; safer working conditions; and rising quality demands
-Three main types of VERA:s are identified: Vegetable oils; Fatty acid esters; and Emulsions of Fatty acid esters in water
-In the mid 1990:s VERA:s only represented a few percent of the 40-60 million kilos / 35 - 120 million ECU's euro-market for release agents in the construction industry[7]
-The market for CRA:s (concrete release agents) has a very low transparency. This is partly due to very differing technical needs in different applications. Low level of chemical knowledge on the part of buyers and "green-image-selling" are however other reasons. Almost one thousand different CRA:s existed in the German market in the mid 1990:s
-The irrelevance of a narrow focus on price comparisons between MORA and VERA is made clear by the example that ”In the Netherlands ... release agent costs make up only 0,04 % of total production costs.”[8]
-The two main sub-markets for CRA:s are Prefab plants and Outdoor construction sites. (In Finland the latter make up about two thirds of the total CRA-market)
In the October 97 Sumovera Newsletter the arguments for VERA:s were summarised with the following table:
Problem with current release agent / Advantage of VERA:sThey are flammable / They are not flammable
They irritate the skin / They don't or hardly irritate the skin
They have a strong smell / They have a mild smell
They attack working clothes, shoe-soles, wooden shuttering etc. / They don't attack working clothes, shoe-soles, wooden shuttering etc.
They may contain volatile solvents which can damage workers' health / They don't contain volatile solvents
They are poorly biodegradable and pollute the soil at construction sites / They are readily biodegradable in the environment
They produce hazardous waste which is very expensive to dispose / They generally don't produce hazardous waste
A context with longer history, broader product range but more narrow geography
There's a point in also telling a second background story to the Sumovera Finland case here in chapter 2 of the SuV-Fi-report, the second chapters of the SPHERE+case reports being where the kind of substitution, as well as the nature of the reasoning behind it, is to be indicated.[9]
I can present the second story because attempts to substitute mineral oil based cutting liquids by vegetable oil based cutting liquids from the late 1960:s to the early 1990:s was in the focus of one of the six company case studies (Karlshamn) that made up one of the two empirical bodies of my doctoral dissertation.[10]
By presenting the second story I want to underline that the substitution that is focused in this report - Sumovera - forms part of a broader substitution of mineral oil based products with vegetable oil based products.[11] Some other products of relevance in the SuV context - besides cutting liquids - for which such a substitution might take place in the future, or is already taking place on a vast scale, are hydraulic oils, chain-saw oils corrosion inhibitors, (welding sprays) etc.[12]
The reasons for the industrial R&D efforts and for the demand forming efforts, aiming at such substitutions, have varied over time and among actors:
When Karlshamn, the Swedish producer of Margarine and food intermediaries, commissioned a consultancy firm to study the markets for technical applications of vegetable oils in 1974 this had a three-fold background: The oil crises of the early 70:s which changed price relations between mineral and vegetable oils; Karlshamns strong position in an area of technology (vegetable oils) that had been neglected since the 19th century; and worries about Karlshamns dependence on the slow-growing food industry. As to the third point it's worth stressing that the Finnish Raisio Group, that in many respects paralleled Karlshamn at that time and today owns most of Karlshamns all the time has had more diversified markets with a strong arm for pulp and paper chemistry.
When two young blue-collar ombudsmen visited Karlshamn in the late 70:s in order to stimulate intensified R&D for vegetable oil based cutting liquids the background can also be stated in three points:
The first was that a nation-wide membership inquiry, into work environment problems related to organic solvents, pointed to the cutting liquid problem since an astonishing number of respondents used the "free-for-suggestions"-part of the questionnaire to indicate problems in this area.
Secondly there was the post-68 urge among young ombudsmen to find a more proactive union role in the work environment field.
A third factor was the bewilderment the ombudsmen investigators felt when they tried to map the cutting liquid market. The bewilderment wasn't lessened by the fact that one of them got a telling-off by the leading supplier to the Swedish cutting liquids market.[13]
When the Swedish National Board for Technical Development (Swedish acronym STU) commissioned an expert on the chemical questions of the engineering industries, Lars Berggren, to survey the industrial intersections between chemistry and engineering and suggest policies, this also led Berggren to attempts to influence Karlshamn among other companies. Key background factors for Berggrens study were: The Swedish chemical Industry was regarded as being biased towards bulk chemistry. Lots of the suppliers of chemicals to the engineering industries had lacking knowledge of the processes in which their products were used. Engineering industries in Sweden had lacking knowledge of chemistry.[14]
Some further actors in "Sumove-cutliq"-Sweden of the 1970:s can be seen on fig. 1 (Hollander (95) p. 97)
The reasoning behind, and the societal framework of, the attempts of substituting mineral oil by vegetable oil in technical applications in the Swedish 70:s thus show striking semblance's with what is said about this in the Sumovera - Definition Phase Final Report in spite of the historical distance of two decades and the differences in structure between the engineering and construction industries.[15]
As a further argument for this detour into the Swedish 70:s I can't resist mentioning that a, by now long since retired, ombudsman at the Swedish Factory Workers Union, Sven Daglund, constantly urged me to get Karlshamn to develop concrete release agents that wouldn't damage the workers in the pre-fab concrete factories that were organised by the Factory Workers Union. (Cf. Annex II)
3. Main actors and context of the Sumovera Finland Drama of the 1990:s
In the Finnish background story to the events around Sumovera I can't go as far back as to the 1970:s. There are, however, strong reasons to look back to the late 80:s/early 90:s since that's the time to which the main actors often return when they explain what's going on now. When presenting the actors I will limit myself to the pre-cast concrete producers, the most likely local VERA supplier and to the concrete technologists who have acted as change agents. Other actors will be more anonymous but will be observable here and there in chapters 4 to 6.
Parma Betonilas Turku plant is a pre-cast hollow-core slabs producer situated rather close to the Turku City Centre. When asked about the plant a unionist, in another section of the building material industry in the Turku region, thought that it was closed. And indeed it was during the trough of the last business cycle which hit the Finnish building trades with great force. During the top of the business cycle of the late 80:s - in 1988 - the Parma Betonila Turku plant had 170 employees producing 1,500 m2 of concrete/day. Today it produces 600 m2 /day with 24 employees. This gives no exact picture of the productivity increase since the production programme is more standardised today but is indicative of the sharp turns that have occurred in the Finnish concrete industry since the late 80:s.[16]
The Parma Betonila Turku plant tested some VERA products from the nearby VERA producer Raisio in the early 90:s. Those were, however, more or less pure vegetable oils with much too high viscosity. So the plant went back to mineral oil based products before closing during the trough of the construction depression. Today the Parma Betonila Turku plant is one of the pilot plants for Sumovera Finland, and one where some of the most constructive tests are undertaken (See Ch. 4 for further details!)
The Ormax concrete roofing tiles plant in Muijala, Lohja at 45 minutes drive NW of Helsinki is the flagship of Sumovera Finland. SuV-Fi researcher Virpi Mikkonen presents the pilot tests being conducted there in the Sumovera Newsletter of October 97.
With its theoretical (?) annual use of some 9,000 kilos of concrete release agents Ormax only represents slightly over one percent of Finnish concrete release agent consumption.[17] It is however strategical since it's a pioneer in Finnish building material industry in striving for and achieving enviro-certification (ISO 14001). It was also the pioneer in this respect in the Scandinavian (and Baltic) roofing tile group Braas Scandinavia with its 10 plants in Finland (2), Sweden (3), Norway (2), Denmark (2) and Estonia(1).