DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY

This teaching note describes the 'Waste Reduction Always Pays' (WRAP) program at the Dow Chemical Company, an employee-centered initiative designed to reduce pollution through a contest for small-scale capital investments. The document analyzes the program's strengths, such as top management support and financial savings, and its weaknesses, including a lack of strategic alignment and limited employee participation, while contrasting it with a different approach used at the Bayside Division.

• The Waste Reduction Always Pays (WRAP) program at Dow Chemical is a contest for small-scale capital investments that evolved from energy-savings proposals in 1981 to include yield improvement in 1983 and waste reduction in 1987. By the 1990s, the program was credited with generating annual savings of approximately $10 million.
• The WRAP program is characterized by several operational strengths: it requires specific physical and return on investment (ROI) data for proposals, maintains a low-bureaucracy structure with a part-time coordinating committee, and receives strong top management support, including the funding of most winning proposals (many of which show an ROI above 30%).
• The program serves as a professional development tool for junior engineers and operators, as winners are given the responsibility to manage the people, resources, and schedules for implementing their proposals, which often leads to subsequent promotions.
• Several systematic weaknesses are identified in the WRAP program, including a lack of prioritization for source reduction over recycling or disposal, a passive approach to technology transfer across different plants, and a lack of explicit links to corporate strategy or customer focus.
• Employee participation in the WRAP program is considered modest compared to Total Quality Management (TQM) goals; for example, in 1992, winning projects represented approximately 120 individuals and teams within a division of roughly 2,300 employees.
• The document contrasts the Louisiana Division's WRAP approach with the Bayside Division's approach. While WRAP is engineering-driven and focuses on process changes and bottom-line improvements, the Bayside approach is operator-driven, grounded in continuous improvement and statistical process control, and emphasizes employee awareness and community relations.
• The Bayside Division's waste reduction initiative was viewed as weak within the company and was considered nearly defunct by late 1992, partly due to minimal manager involvement and a traditional budgeting process where waste reduction competed with other capital projects.

APA

Baker, K. (1995). DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY. World Resources Institute. https://pdf.wri.org/bell/tn_1-56973-141-1_teaching_note_english.pdf

Chicago

Baker, Kenneth. DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY. World Resources Institute, 1995. https://pdf.wri.org/bell/tn_1-56973-141-1_teaching_note_english.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Baker |first1=Kenneth |title=DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY |publisher=World Resources Institute |date=1995 |url=https://pdf.wri.org/bell/tn_1-56973-141-1_teaching_note_english.pdf |access-date=17 August 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{baker1995dow, author = {Baker, Kenneth}, title = {{DOW CHEMICAL COMPANY}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, year = {1995}, url = {https://pdf.wri.org/bell/tn_1-56973-141-1_teaching_note_english.pdf}, urldate = {2026-08-17}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }