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Call Dr Paul Tebo an optimist. He sees a future where a giant company like DuPont is accepted as a crusading global environmentalist able to use advances in biotechnology to create new safe products, eliminate waste, drastically curb energy demands and stop depleting the world's precious resources.

If that sounds too good to be true, Tebo has built at least some credibility over the past eight years in his position as vice-president for health, safety and the environment at DuPont.

He cites the statistics with the pride of a parent recounting a child's triumphs.

Greenhouse gas emissions down 60 per cent since 1990. Air toxics down 70 per cent. Air carcinogens down 90 per cent. Energy use held flat for a decade despite a 30 per cent increase in production.

That may still be considered inadequate not least by DuPont itself but it is an indication of how the global corporate debate has changed over the past decade. The new goal at DuPont, pushed by Tebo, is "sustainable growth". The new environmental and safety motto is "the goal is zero".

And while the DuPont agenda may still be greeted with suspicion, the company that brought the world such basics as nylon, teflon, lycra and kevlar is determined to transform itself and its image. It only makes commercial sense.

Tebo says the abolition of waste and emissions, for example, has now become an essential part of the business rather than something off to the side.

"It started as a basic shift in our commitment to environmentalism," he said. "It's a fundamental shift away from what the rules and regulations telling you what you need to do to the idea that you need to do what the public needs you to do.

"The next step is that you get into that third stage when, if you affect the environment the right way, you can grow your business. It then becomes fundamental not having waste in your corporation and so the whole concept of sustainability begins to make sense to business people."

Tebo understands the transformation personally as well. He is a chemical engineer himself, previously in charge of running the chemicals business for DuPont. He was chosen deliberately to try to integrate a business and environment strategy from the inside rather than have environmental targets imposed from someone unfamiliar with business.

That's not a modest goal in a company which operates in more than 70 countries and has about 90,000 employees.

He has been in Australia to address, among others, the Earthwatch Institute and the ECOS Corporation, which advises companies such as DuPont on environmental issues as well as more predictable audiences like the Business Council of Australia.

It reflects a corporate culture at DuPont which has leapfrogged right past the continuing debate on things like climate change and greenhouse gases. Right past, too, the common argument in Australia between profits and protecting the environment. In the DuPont dictionary, the two are now so co-dependent that one is not possible without the other.

Naturally, the right balance and the best methods are still going to be fiercely argued, but the basic problems are common ground. Global warming, for example, is accepted as a given by DuPont as is the need to drastically alter its own corporate behaviour.

Tebo says DuPont doesn't agree with all the details of the Kyoto protocol which the Bush Administration has now rejected. "But we agree on the need to have a process that reduces greenhouse gases," he says. "We are for the objectives."

That means DuPont's main interest is in establishing a workable system of emissions trading. While this is still controversial, it is the most promising approach for progress in the US at the moment and companies like DuPont are deep in negotiations with environmental groups about how it could best work.

It's an example of the market dynamics that always dominate US-based companies. The challenge is, of course, to harness market economics to incorporate other goals. In DuPont, the methods can become very pointed often in ways that would still be regarded as dubious in a European or Australian model. Like pay rises.

One of the corporation's clearest goals, for example, is to try to use more renewable resources.

DuPont has now set a target that 10 per cent of its energy needs and 25 per cent of its revenue will come from renewable resources by 2010.

"The head of our purchasing department, the people who buy our raw materials, now have it as a critical operating task to get to 10 per cent renewable energy," Tebo said.

"It's one thing for me or the chairman to talk about it, but when the person in charge of doing the purchasing of our energy has compensation tied to it, that is how we get things done."

Paul Gilding, the former head of Greenpeace International, established the ECOS Corporation in Australia in 1995 to work primarily with companies in chemical, transport and resource sectors.

"When DuPont sets a target," he said, "people take it seriously because they know it will be achieved."

Whether it will ever be enough to satisfy the critics is not so evident. Until the very last part of a 200-year existence that started as a gunpowder plant in Delaware, DuPont's environmental history was not a happy one.

But Gilding and Tebo make the point that it is the large, global corporates which are now becoming the environmental leaders rather than smaller local players.

Despite the common perception that it is the developing world that suffers most from pollution, for companies like DuPont the main offenders remain their older factories usually based in the US or Europe. The newer ones in other countries are usually far cleaner.

The financial benefits of eliminating waste are also now far more accepted than they were. In terms of energy consumption, for example, DuPont today is looking at such sources as landfill gas which currently is either flared or released into the environment as an alternative to natural gas.

"We think it will be a competitive advantage for us," Tebo said.

And one that makes a lot of sense when energy prices go up as much as they did last year.

Not that DuPont has escaped the worldwide economic slowdown. DuPont is promoting itself as a "science" company, which no doubt sounds more reassuring to the public than chemicals. But it also fits in with its next big goal of using biotechnology to transform itself and much of the world's products.

The company slogan changed from "better things for better living" to "the miracles of science".

For all of Tebo's enthusiasm and all of DuPont's smooth public relations, however, that won't be an easy sell.

It doesn't help that the prospect of advances in biotechnology becomes totally confused with the idea of genetically modified crops, particularly in food.

Tebo does acknowledge that industry has not done a good enough job of persuading people of the benefits of biotechnology and genetically enhanced products, and that it underestimated consumer resistance. DuPont has licensed two genetically modified products from other companies corn and soy beans.

But he boasts that the DuPont's commitment to safety is such that two decades after the corporation decided to focus on biotechnology, it still doesn't have one of its own products on the market although it has plenty it is testing in its research labs.

In fact, most of DuPont's interest comes from the idea of using biotechnology to develop new commodity materials rather than food.

"What we are doing is taking our history in chemistry and material science and adding biology," Tebo said.

"Our primary interest is much broader than agriculture. The Sorona product is the first example of producing a commodity material.

"It is a polyester and one half of the molecule is going to come from corn starch. But it could potentially come from cassava if you built a plant in Brazil or some place like that.

"It is an example of where this is going to pay off longer term so you might use renewable feedstocks to produce broad-based materials for society.

"We also believe that in electronics biotechnology is going to play out big time. It may be the next generation computer will use biological switching rather than electrical switching."

If that sounds far-fetched, think of the world before DuPont discovered nylon. Think of more recent days before lycra and before teflon.

Then think corn starch or soybeans and the future.