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Bob Ferrone specializes in integrating industrial design, engineering, quality, manufacturing and environmental management systems for improving environmental and economic performance. He's worked on ISO 9001 and 14001 implementation with numerous private and public sector clients, including successfully guiding them to ISO 14001 certifications.

Michelle: I know your career has spanned many different countries and working with many different clients, but can you give us a little background about how you got into quality?

Bob: First, let me just say I think your approach in your organization to not take the traditional silo approach to quality is outstanding. I think the field is beginning to move rapidly, and we're seeing changes in many of the magazines that I've submitted articles to, say we only specialize in that particular issue, like in quality, we only do traditional quality. I think the expansion that you guys have done to begin to integrate environmental issues in that is outstanding.

And I want to commend you and the organization.

Michelle: Oh, thank you. That's great.

Bob: My background. I started off at Honeywell in 1965 or 6. I went in as quality engineer and they were developing new products. And I got really interested in the development of this technology. Magnetic disc and the headset rewrite heads. And I started that whole operation up for Honeywell.

We then moved to San Diego. I set up the facility in San Diego. Once that thing was up and running, I came back and I got interested, again, in new technologies. I went to work for a company called Photo Man. Which was fascinating. We developed the first laser computer system, and that first client was The New York Times, which was just amazing to work in.

We took all of their work, and they had papers that went back since the start of the New York Times, and all these subsidiaries, and they wanted to transfer all that information onto this computer.

So, we went through doing all of that. In the midst of that, and this is the kind of build-up that got me into looking at environment, I used to watch the amount of paper being wasted and it always registered. How could you waste so much of that valuable commodity and not recoup that?

I went through that. The company finally ran out of funds after we had that machine up and running. And that was the first computer system, by the way, in The New York Times.

And it was interesting to watch the editors who had never been in front of a computer system.

Anyways, I went out of that. I then went to work for BASF, and I became the chief engineer for both a disk operation and Mandela tapes, and this was really the turn-over for me, looking at the environment. When we made the magnetic tapes, tapes were done with a formulation of oxides and chemistries, and it would go through this process of dispersing the oxides onto my lab and then going down a machine which was called the below, the Lloyd.

And it was maybe 2 or 300 feet long. And every so often you end up with a spike, and that thing would catch fire. And we'd have to put the substrate fire out. And I asked the question, why are we causing this kind of a problem inside of this machine? And with the chemistries going up the stack?

So, I put together a project to look at recouping all of the chemistry. Could we take those chemistries, separate them, and then reuse them into the product? And we went through and had to sell that to the Germans, the headquarters side of BASF, which was an interesting set of dialogs. We got approval for it. We went through the setup, beginning to separate those chemistries, capturing it and separating it.

And then we turned that system on. We recouped 95% of all the chemicals going up the stack. And we were able to separate it. And we use that in the process. And what happened was, this was 1972, Nixon put in this department called the EPA.

So now we were ahead of the game on emissions.