Pollution Control

7 Key excerpts on "Pollution Control"

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  eBook - PDF

  Integrated Approaches to Water Pollution Problems

  • J. Bau, J.D. Henriques, J.P. Lobo Ferreira, J. de Oliveira Raposo(Authors)
  • 1991(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  PART II Policies for Pollution Control Chapter 9 WATER Pollution Control: LEGAL, ECONOMIC AND INSTITUTIONAL ISSUES M R Solanes (United Nations, New York, USA) ABSTRACT Pollution is an externality resulting from point and nonpoint sources. Its control includes regulatory measures and economic incentives. Regulations can consist of effluent standards, technological requirements, and standards of water quality for receiving bodies. Economic incentives can consist of subsidies or charges. All of the above can be combined through permit and charge systems. Pollution Control demands adequate planning and the granting of enforcing powers to implementing agencies. Legal actions for water control include a variety of public and private measures in administrative and judicial fora. Authority to act “ex officio”, to issue injunctions, and to enforce abatement and cease and desist orders are crucial to Pollution Control. Legal remedies include strict liability and accumulative fines. Procedural changes have liberalized the rules to confer standing to sue and the system of proofs, thereby fostering citizen participation and suits. Yet, it is often argued that economic incentives and financial charges are more effective than regulations. Institutional arrangements for the enforcement of pollution include national and local authorities. The former set policies, objectives, standards, and basic procedures. They also monitor compliance. Enforcement is predominantly the role of the latter. The river basin is often used as a geographical unit for water management and Pollution Control. Finally, groundwater protection is of increasing concern. Protection measures include control of well injection, wellhead protection, underground tanks, and percolation of polluting substances.

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  Unwelcome Harvest

  Agriculture and pollution

  • Gordon R. Conway, Jules N. Pretty(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  As yet there have been no cases of permit trading being used in agriculture. In theory, the system could be used to control fertilizer pollution. A water agency would set the total annual nitrogen burden for a particular watershed and from this compute the maximum nitrogen application per hectare. Each farm in the watershed would then receive a permit for so many tonnes of nitrogen based on its land area, but would be free to sell all or part of its share at whatever price the market would bear. The advantage to the water agency is that pollution would be kept to a desirable level with relatively small administrative costs – providing, of course, that policing to prevent non-permit use does not prove cosdy. The system also has the advantage that it would reward farmers who are efficient at producing high agricultural returns with low levels of fertilizer inputs. This would work equally well for quotas for inputs. Farmers allocated a quota of units for pesticide and fertilizer use could then trade them with other farmers.

  The Legal Control of Pollution

  Even taken together, advisory and economic measures are rarely sufficient to control pollution to levels that are both socially just and efficient. In theory, economic policies have a great deal of attraction; they appear simple and elegant, but if high levels of efficiency and justice are to be combined they have to be reinforced or replaced by a legal apparatus that is inevitably complex and cumbersome by comparison.

  Laws to control pollution have a long history: in Britain the government of Edward I prohibited the use of coal in London in the thirteenth century because it was thought to be injurious to health; and during the Middle Ages local by-laws protecting watercourses were common. 25 Today, the legal control of pollution is provided for in two ways: individuals damaged or threatened by pollution can use private law to take polluters to court; and governments can use “public” law, which provides various mechanisms for the control of sources of pollution, together with support for enforcement agencies.

  Private Law

  Private law is concerned with the rights of individuals and how they can obtain redress for damages they have suffered. In theory, it is a powerful deterrent, but in practice its usefulness is limited. In the UK the type of legal action appropriate to environmental pollution is the private nuisance action, concerned with the unlawful interference with a person’s use or enjoyment of land, or some right over it, or in connection with it. 26

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  Water Quality Management

  • Peter Krenkel(Author)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Since adverse water quality or polluted waters are at least a public nuisance, if not a public health hazard, various classical court liti-gations and rulings have evolved between the polluters as defendants and downstream water users as plaintiffs. Most of the rulings in these cases treated pollution as a nuisance, trespassing, or negligence. In recent decades, the interest in protection of the environment has created a new interest in water quality among lawyers, judges, and legis-lators. Special courses on environmental law are now taught in most law schools, and a new era of attorneys study recent landmark decisions dealing with water quality and the protection of the environment. Many law firms now specialize in handling environmental problems. The term environmental law primarily refers to that body of law which seeks to regulate individual, corporate, and governmental behavior in order to prevent adverse environmental consequences (Wengert, 1975). It is a form of social control having as its objective the preservation of envi-ronmental values such as ecological balance, natural beauty, public health, and resources productivity, in order to maintain a stable and satis-factory level of living and quality of life for present and future genera-tions. It is based on legislative enactments as well as judicial law resulting from specific litigations (Wengert, 1975). The primary objects of environ-mental law are the individual, firm, or government agency whose actions Water Pollution Control Legislation in the United States 29 may be alleged or construed to pose a threat of damage to the environ-ment. Events Prior to 1948 The control of water pollution in the United States has been a most per-vasive problem in which probably the most difficult problem has been the traditional battle between states rights and federal power.

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  Highway Pollution

  • R.S. Hamilton, R.M. Harrison(Authors)
  • 1991(Publication Date)
  • Elsevier Science

    (Publisher)

  However, many legal commentators would not disagree that an effective system of control must be based on three essential principles with regard to pollutants : prevention, mitigation and compensation [2]. Few legal systems deny the notion that a person injured by an activity should receive compensation, either from the author of the activity or from the State, or an insurance fund. Likewise legal systems commonly lay down provisions for mitigating effects of deleterious activities, for example by allowing courts to make orders stopping activities, or by making provision for grant aided schemes to lessen an activity's impart. Prevention, however, of polluting activities is not always well represented in law. The deleterious nature of an activity must be clearly observable, and its domestic consequences will often have to outweigh the national advantages it brings before a state takes preventive action. Furthermore, adequate preventive technology may be a pre-condition to action. Action once taken may assume a number of legal forms.

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  Scottish Environmental Law Essentials

  • Francis McManus(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • Edinburgh University Press

    (Publisher)

  9 INTEGRATED POLLUTION, PREVENTION AND CONTROL AND ENVIRONMENTAL PERMITTING INTRODUCTION In this chapter we discuss integrated pollution prevention and control and permitting. The regulation of pollution was traditionally piece-meal in the United Kingdom as a whole. This situation was a legacy of its Victorian origins. Not only were a variety of different agen-cies involved in regulating pollution, from both industrial and other sources, but often different agencies would regulate different forms of pollution from the same premises. For example, local authorities were, and still are, responsible for enforcing the provisions of the Clean Air Act 1956 in relation to grit and dust emanating from certain industrial premises into the atmosphere, whereas the regulation of river pollu-tion from the same premises fell to be regulated by the relevant rivers purification authority. That is to say, the relevant agency simply pos-sessed the power to regulate pollution which was being discharged into one medium. The obvious disadvantage of such a fragmented approach to the control of pollution is that effective enforcement action by one agency may simply cause another environmental problem, which falls to be addressed by another agency. For example, if a local authority required the occupier of the factory to provide adequate drainage to the relevant site, and the drainage which was installed discharged into a nearby watercourse, pollution of that watercourse would fall to be regulated by another agency. The first attempt which was made by Parliament to deal with envi-ronmental pollution in an integrated and holistic manner was the Control of Pollution Act 1974 (COPA). Part 1 of COPA required a waste disposal authority, when it was considering whether to grant a waste licence, to refer the proposal to the relevant river purification authority. Furthermore, the former was also required to take into account the representations of the latter in deciding whether to grant a licence.

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  Environmental Risk Management and Corporate Lending

  A Global Perspective

  • Phil Case(Author)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Woodhead Publishing

    (Publisher)

  The legal position Air pollution The term air pollution encompasses all discharges to atmosphere, whether they be visible (e.g. grit, dust, or smoke) or invisible (e.g. heavy metals, organic chemicals or odours). Policies to control air pollution must therefore relate to the entire spectrum of emissions, both the obvious and the invisible. Both operators and regulators must not only take account of day-to-day operations but also put in place 'disaster planning': the incidents at Flixborough, UK, Seveso, Italy, and Bhopal, India, provide examples of the potential impact of noxious air emissions. While some discharges to the atmosphere are strictly of local 51 power to clean up controlled waters and adjacent sites. Subsequent clean- up costs can be recovered from those who 'caused' or 'knowingly permitted' the pollution. More extensive clean-up powers under the WRA 91 came into force in April 1999. These new powers allow the Environment Agency to serve notices (Works Notices) requiring the polluters to clean up water pollution or land creating a risk of water pollution. Since both the Environment Agency and the water companies have statutory enforcement powers, a polluter of controlled waters may have an action brought against it: directly by the Environment Agency; jointiy, where it is linked as a defendant with its local water company by the Environment Agency; by its local water company, either owing to the Environment Agency prosecuting the water company first or through the water company initiating the action; by an aggrieved third party under common law.

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  Economics for Environmental Professionals

  • Frank R. Spellman(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • CRC Press

    (Publisher)

  155 6 Regulatory Approaches to Pollution Control A healthy ecology is the basis for a healthy economy. —Claudine Schneider, former U.S. Congresswoman The role of a species in an ecosystem may be apparent only after it has been removed. INTRODUCTION This chapter briefly describes several regulatory approaches to environmental pol-icymaking. The goals of this chapter are to introduce several important analytic terms, concepts, and approaches and to describe the conceptual foundations of each approach. Specifically, this chapter discusses the following four general approaches to environmental policymaking: (1) command-and-control regulation, (2) market-based incentives, (3) hybrid approaches, and (4) voluntary initiatives. Although command-and-control regulations have been a commonly used method of environ-mental regulation in the United States, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) also employs the three other approaches. Market-based incentives and hybrid approaches offer the regulated community an opportunity to meet standards with increased flexibility and lower costs compared to many command-and-control regulations, while voluntary initiatives may allow environmental improvements in areas not traditionally regulated by the USEPA. ROLE OF COST IN SETTING OF REGULATIONS In a book devoted to costs and benefits related to protecting our environment and to providing environmental professionals with some basic knowledge of the economics inherently involved in decision making and in practice, it only makes sense that we talk about the role of cost in the setting of regulations. The importance of cost and its role in setting many state and federal air Pollution Control regulations, as well as regulations for the various environmental media, cannot be overstated. In this age of tight money, cost is a huge variable that should be considered in the levying and enactment of all environmental regulations.

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