![]()
Part I
The Difficulty of Getting There: The Evolution of Policy
Robert Gottlieb
If the 1970s was, in the environmental policy arena, the decade of pollution control, and the 1980s was the decade when pollution policies began to shift toward such approaches as waste minimization and marketing incentives, then the 1990s has clearly come to be defined as the decade of pollution prevention. But legislation and policy directives notwithstanding, policymakers are still asking just what pollution prevention means.
Pollution prevention is a concept in search of a policy framework. Its definitions remain contested, its terrain remains unclear. Is pollution prevention a form of exhortation by way of technical assistance, an encouragement of the market to achieve presumably more efficient outcomes, or a new type of planning? Is it a matter exclusively for environmental agencies and regulators, or does it necessarily address other arenas such as workplace and product regulation? More than an abstraction but still less than a coherent policy, the pollution prevention initiatives and debates of the 1990s in fact point to some of the problematic features of environmental policymaking itself in a period when the role of government has become the subject of a highly charged debate. And while pollution prevention has become widely accepted in its broadest, least-focused terms, examining the evolution of toxics policy from the 1970s to the 1990s serves the function of better understanding how we got to where we are today, as well as sorting out pollution preventionās multiple reference points and diverse implications for policy.
Part I of Reducing Toxics examines how we shifted from the dominant pollution control discourse to the more open-ended and often ill-defined pollution prevention approaches that have emerged during the past decade. The origins and development of pollution control during the 1970s, the authors of Chapters 1 and 2 argue, involved a complex process with sometimes unintended outcomes, influenced significantly by certain dominant assumptions and biases in environmental policymaking. Constructed in an era of rising environmental advocacy, great urgency in mitigating visible problems of pollution, increased reliance on a federal role in regulating such pollutants, and a continuing belief that solutions were primarily technical in nature and that technologies could be located to address the pollutant of the moment, pollution control policies were developed as part of an ambitious but largely unimplementable agenda. At the same time (as Chapter 3 authors have described) there were other potential paths for environmental policymaking, including the 1976 Toxic Substances Control Act, that were never sufficiently explored. Those initiatives were constrained in part by the prevailing structures of policymaking, resistance from the regulated, and an unwillingness of policymakers to follow the logic of such new policies into the hitherto proprietary domain of industry decisionmaking.
The pollution issues, notably the question of toxics generation and use, were not exclusive to the environmental domain, where policies were most concerned with the endpoint in the flow of toxics or pollutants, specifically the management of wastes at their point of release into the environment. The focus on toxics generation and use shifted the focus to include questions of both production (how things were produced) as well as consumption (what things were produced and what they were used for) rather than environmental management as external to those processes (e.g., postproduction or postconsumption wastes). But policymaking in the areas of workplace and product safety regulation, as discussed by the authors of Chapter 4, remained even more distant than environmental policy from the sources of the pollution or the hazards embedded in production and consumption processes. By the 1990s, however, pollution prevention appeared to be fully on the rise, as the authors of Chapter 5 discuss. But the nature of that paradigm shift in policy, whether in terms of the definition of such policy, the role of information, the search for new policy instruments, evaluations of risk, or the reemergence of state and local governments as major players, has been filled with uncertainties and ambiguities, making it, at the very least, an open-ended process.
Thus, we come face to face with a core dilemma in contemporary environmental policymaking. It is better, as is now commonly accepted, to prevent or reduce at the source various forms of environmental hazards or (more generically) pollution itself, rather than to simply manage such pollution, once it has become a problem requiring attention. But there is neither consensus nor a significant number of examples of successful policymaking in how to prevent pollution. To resolve such a dilemmaāthe need to make pollution prevention a successful and implementable guide to policy in light of the uncertainties of how or even whether to undertake such policiesābecomes then the task of environmental policymaking in the years to come.
![]()
1
The Pollution Control System: Themes and Frameworks
Robert Gottlieb
Maureen Smith
Managing Pollution: Policy Conundrums
At the heart of contemporary toxics policy reside a series of conundrums. For at least a century, policies related to human health and the environment reflected what was considered to be a basic truth of contemporary industrial society: that many products and materials produced and used by industry, including those that were hazardous, have made ālife worth living,ā as a notable chemical industry promotional campaign once declared.1 Increasingly, policymakers are confronting the fact that these same products and processes potentially pose widespread risks to human health and the environment.To resolve this dilemma of production, an elaborate set of legislative and regulatory initiatives at both the federal and state levels were developed to address the concerns about toxics. More generally, policies focused on the larger issue of pollution as a whole.Yet most such initiatives remained aloof from core production decisions regarding what to produce, how to produce, and why specific materials and processes were used. Although these early policies, which imposed high costs of regulation, focus on the endpoint of the production process, they also served to highlight opportunities for intervention in the early stages of production, when decisions regarding what to produce are made. Debates over these policies ushered in new forms of environmental conflict over the degree and nature of public intervention in production activities and decisions.
Opportunities for intervention first occurred in a significant way during the 1960s, when growing public concerns about environmental hazards increased pressure on Congress to authorize federal funds aimed at reversing the most visible forms of environmental pollution. Prior to this period, federal efforts for the most part had been limited to grant programs to ease the burden on state and local communities which were ill-equipped and often reluctant to tackle such issues. As a result, the policy debates began to shift toward establishing a more expansive federal roleāa shift related in part to the increasing political prominence of environmental issues. Within a remarkably short period of time, a new national environmental policy or pollution control system was constructed, based on a series of new laws enacted after 1970 and new regulatory agencies established in part to carry out the mandates specified in those acts.
These new legislative mandates and regulatory activities focused on various forms of pollution resulting from a wide range of industrial processes and products. Regulatory targets included the creation of hazardous wastes, nonhazardous solid wastes, and various other byproducts of manufacturing and energy generation; the deliberate or inadvertent introduction of hazardous constituents of manufacturing processes into the air and often into surface water or groundwater; the occupational risks stemming from production activities; and the incorporation of hazardous constituents into products.
Until the 1970s, solid and liquid wastes from manufacturing processes had been disposed of by simply dumping them into pits, landfills, or waste ponds, or by discharging them into surface waters, deep wells, or the oceans. Disposal of volatile chemicals generally had been accomplished by evaporation or percolation into the ground. Occupational exposures received limited attention, with only a handful of workplace hazards subject to regulatory intervention. Product review was even more narrowly conceived, with such known hazards as tetraethyl lead in gasoline or asbestos in building materials escaping regulatory review.
By the 1970s, however, a sense of crisis had come to dominate the environmental policy discourse. Lakes and rivers were polluted to the degree that they were no longer fit for recreational use. Fish, shellfish, birds, and other wildlife were seen as threatened to the point of extinction due to chemical contamination originating from industrial processes and agricultural practices. Air quality in many parts of the United States had reached unhealthy levels for large populationsāas many as 150 million people, according to Clean Air Act attainment standards. Industrial chemicals, primarily organic solvents and metals, were found in measurable quantities in drinking water wells and groundwater aquifers, creating a new and unanticipated environmental threat. Dump sites, including many that previously had been abandoned, posed substantial risks to nearby communities, even forcing evacuations of houses and neighborhoods. Serious occupational hazards, with allowable risks at significantly lower thresholds than environmental standards, were identified in a number of industries. The environmental crisis, defined increasingly as a priority policy area, came to be conceived in part as a toxics crisis.
In response, the pollution control system took shape. Yet instead of addressing the sources of pollution and contamination or their multiple exposure routes, policymakers focused on managing specific kinds of wastes and emissions. This focus, in turn, resulted in separate policies designed to (i) capture and control some types of air emissions; (ii) place certain limits on discharges to water; (iii) regulate treatment, storage, and land disposal of hazardous solid wastes; and (iv) designate best available treatment technologies to establish limits on these adverse effects of industrial processes. Legislation also was introduced to address other nonenvi-ronmental routes of exposure (occupational or product-based) and to respond to the continuing introduction of new hazardous substances into the environment.
The structure of legislation and regulatory review conceived in the early and mid 1970s and broadly implemented by the end of the decade created an environmental management system centered on the treatment of wastes after they had been generated. Emphasis was placed on industries meeting regulatory limits by their identifying demonstrated, available, and proven control technologies. The policy shift that began taking place in 1970 with the passage of the Clean Air Act and other legislation and the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency specifically augmented the federal role in terms of regulating discharges and disposal techniques while expanding various support mechanisms to enhance such management strategies. With the passage of the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) six years later, the federal role evolved further. EPA, in particular, took center stage in terms of its broad oversight of wide-ranging regulatory initiatives, from the phasing out of land disposal methods to the creation of a hazardous waste tracking system. This new federal role, moreover, led to an increasing centralization and concentration of functions and activities in relation to both regulatory agendas and a new and rapidly expanding waste management or āenvironmentalā industry that arose in response to such regulatory requirements.
Establishing federal policies on pollution, wastes, and hazards, however, had only limited success in stemming the flow of toxics through production systems and into the environment. The scale of the problem involved in both managing existing waste streams as well as in monitoring and reviewing the hundreds of chemicals introduced each year overwhelmed the available resources of the regulators. The sheer number of chemicals to review, as mandated by the Toxic Substances Control Act alone, presented a formidable obstacle for effective oversight.
The emphasis on pollution control increased the difficulty in addressing and quantifying the widespread presence of environmental hazards throughout the production cycle. Pollution control strategies were designed to treat or remove toxic contaminants from waste streams. But, as it was increasingly pointed out, the tec...
