Reducing Toxics: A New Approach To Policy And Industrial Decisionmaking

by Robert Gottlieb (Editor)

Overview

In Reducing Toxics, leading experts address industry, technology, health, and policy issues and explore the potential for pollution prevention at the industry and facility levels. They consider both the regulatory and institutional settings of toxics reduction initiatives, prescribe strategies for developing a prevention framework, and apply these principles in analyzing industry case studies. Among the topics considered are:

• the evolution of, and limits to, current environmental policy
• incorporating prevention into production planning and decisionmaking
• do voluntary programs lead to industry greening or greenwashing?
• case studies of the chemical, aerosols, radiator repair and electric vehicle industries
• opportunities for and barriers to pollution prevention

Reducing Toxics offers an analytic framework for defining and understanding different approaches in the toxics area and describes the basis for a new policy and industrial decisionmaking construct.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781610911023
Publisher:	Island Press
Publication date:	04/22/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	460
File size:	17 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Robert Gottlieb is Coordinator of the Environmental Analysis and Policy area of the Department of Urban Planning at UCLA.

Read an Excerpt

Reducing Toxics

A New Approach to Policy and Industrial Decisionmaking

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By Robert Gottlieb

ISLAND PRESS

Copyright © 1995 Island Press
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-61091-102-3

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CHAPTER 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 "life worth living," as a notable chemical industry promotional campaign once declared. 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 role—a 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 populations—as 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 "environmental" 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 technologies used often simply shifted the location of the pollutants. Further, since pollution control technology could not be designed to destroy one hundred percent of the toxics released from industrial processes, it followed that at least traces would be discharged to the environment. Such releases often were completely unregulated or were permitted if maintained within established limits. As a consequence, hundreds of thousands of separate, distinct sources were allowed to release toxic chemicals in quantities that now are recognized as staggering when considered in total.

The limits of pollution control also became visible in the deficiencies of the waste management, treatment, and disposal programs put in place subsequent to RCRA and CERCLA (legislation establishing the clean-up of hazardous waste sites).The regulation of hazardous waste facilities has been implemented slowly, with EPA continually seeking to meet Congressionally designated deadlines. These included "hammer" provisions provided under the 1984 amendments to RCRA for land disposal bans for certain solvents and other wastes, standards related to underground storage tanks, or regulations affecting small quantity hazardous waste generators. The enforcement of many of these regulations posed yet another set of problems for the regulators. As a result, from these and other policy puzzles, pollution control, though established as the dominant policy system, increasingly was seen as an ineffective approach to managing pollution flows.

Seeking Change: The Emergence of Pollution Prevention

By the mid to late 1980s, the extensive pollution control system had come under attack from a variety of sources both inside and outside of government. Numerous reports were issued which challenged the assumptions, capabilities, costs, and results of pollution control as a comprehensive environmental protection system capable of addressing hazards at each stage of the production cycle. In this period, a new approach was sought, which some defined as source reduction, others as waste reduction, or, as EPA called it, waste minimization. In the process, a debate emerged over both the terms and related programmatic content of what might constitute a new approach, or new policy "paradigm." The focus on managing pollution through treatment and disposal methods shifted to a more generic argument over how best to handle the toxics issue.

In January 1989, the EPA issued a statement in the Federal Register on Pollution Prevention that sought to demonstrate the Agency's new commitment toward a different approach to toxics. Yet pollution prevention, even as its definition evolved and as efforts were established to create new, cross-media or multimedia forms of regulatory review, essentially remained an ambiguous concept and framework for policy. Despite its apparent purpose in stopping pollution at its source, pollution prevention as first introduced by EPA had no center of gravity for policymaking and instead appeared to mask certain fundamental differences in approach regarding the role of policy in addressing questions of production design and decisionmaking.

As a widely heralded new policy framework, pollution prevention increasingly became defined in contrast to pollution control, and the language of fundamental change—even of paradigm shift—in turn became pervasive. Pollution prevention seemed to signal a major break from the particular regulatory formats and the conceptual frameworks of pollution control that had become rigid over nearly two decades, as local authorities, then states, and then the federal government attempted to address the unwanted environmental byproducts of an advancing industrial society. Pollution prevention also was viewed as a response to the failures and limitations of the pollution control regime, among them, the continuing chemical pollution of the environment and the high costs to both industry and the public imposed by the bureaucratic inefficiencies of pollution control regulations.

In differentiating pollution prevention from pollution control, two core themes, or axes of change, have tended to be emphasized. The first referred to the necessary progression from a "single medium" to a "multimedia" basis for regulations. By the 1980s, this important regulatory format had in fact become fully constituted as its own specialty under the label of "integrated pollution control," seeking to differentiate itself from the narrow, single-medium focus of the dominant control strategies primarily embedded in EPA's program offices (Air, Water, Solid Waste, etc.). The single-medium system of pollution control had, from the outset, focused on the individual entry points of various pollutants into the environment (the "end of the pipe"), and had given rise to separate and uncoordinated bodies of regulation organized primarily around air, water, land, workplace, and consumer products, with fragments of each administered by multiple federal agencies. Indeed, by the late 1970s, the system already appeared dysfunctional: for example, the federal regulation of vinyl chloride, as David Doniger pointed out, was addressed through fifteen different statutes and five federal agencies, creating an extraordinarily complex process with no clear outcomes.

Integrated pollution control, building jointly from the efficiency arguments of organizational specialists and the ecosystems perspective of biologists, emphasized the common bases and interconnectedness of medium-specific problems, and began to seek and support approaches to address them more comprehensively at common points of origin. This orientation of integrated pollution control to common sources of multimedia pollution problems came to embody the "upstream," or preventative interests ascribed to pollution prevention policy.

The other core theme that came to be emphasized in defining pollution prevention policy was more nebulously cast in terms of a "new relationship" (typically a "partnership") between regulators and the regulated (primarily industry). Broadly speaking, pollution prevention was considered by some to be headed away from the historical dependence on what was by then known as the "command-and-control" format for pollution control regulation. That term loosely connoted the particular mixture of available regulatory instruments and other tools of intervention employed to carry out pollution control policies, which included (as with air regulations) highly detailed and specific standards directly enforced at the unit-process level through operating permits.

What pollution prevention headed toward along this axis remained far less clear, but various ways of thinking about it began to emerge. One concept, often touted by industry, reemphasized the economist's analysis of the pollution problem as a defect in the free market; namely, that "spillover" or external costs of production (pollution, noise, etc.), are not borne by producers, and not reflected in the prices of products and services. These products and services do not, therefore, reflect their true "social cost." Because the remedies available through common law to those who do suffer the external costs are generally inadequate, some form of additional government intervention was seen as justified. Since neoclassical economists (several of whom figured prominently in constructing the economic discourse for environmental policy) nevertheless tended to have great respect for what they considered the otherwise efficient and flexible characteristics of free market forces, their criticism of pollution control and view of pollution prevention tended to emphasize the need for regulatory options that mimicked or recreated competitive markets.

Thus, one view of pollution prevention (indeed, of regulatory reform in general) became substantially characterized by the application of market-based incentive mechanisms for the "harnessing" of market forces in the service of a cleaner environment. Most prominent among the mechanisms advanced has been the creation of highly regulated regional markets in which quantified rights to pollute can be traded. In Southern California, for example, a recorded exchange involved the Anchor Glass Container Corporation of Huntington Park and Union Carbide Corporation's Torrance facility. Under the exchange, Anchor Glass purchased 3,446,478 pounds of nitrogen oxide emissions from Union Carbide for a price of $1,275,197.

Emissions taxes also continued to receive some attention. This perspective similarly tended to suggest that intrusive federal micromanagement—particularly the uniform point-source standards that have inhibited flexibility, and thus innovation and efficiency—needed to be, at a minimum, deemphasized and reworked for compatibility with alternative market-based tools. This market-focused conceptual approach has also become a frame of reference for the advocacy of pollution prevention voluntarism, or what the Business Roundtable (the organization of CEOs of the largest industrial corporations) described as creating successful facilities "when they are not told how to approach pollution prevention."

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Reducing Toxics by Robert Gottlieb. Copyright © 1995 Island Press. Excerpted by permission of ISLAND PRESS.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Acknowledgments
Introduction
 
PART I. The Difficulty of Getting There: The Evolution of Policy
Chapter 1. The Pollution Control System: Themes and Frameworks
Chapter 2. By Air, Water, and Land: The Media-Specific Approach to Toxics Policies
Chapter 3. Shifting to Prevention: The Limits of Current Policy
Chapter 4. Disassociating Toxics Policies: Occupational Risk and Product Hazards
Chapter 5. New Approaches to Toxics: Production Design, Right-to-know, and Definition Debates
 
PART II. Industry Settings: Opportunities and Limits For Pollution Prevention
-Note
Chapter 6. Greening or Greenwashing?: The Evolution of Industry Decisionmaking
Chapter 7. The Chemical Industry: Structure and Function
Chapter 8. The Chemical Industry: Process Changes and the Search for Cleaner Technologies
Chapter 9. Pollution Prevention for Emerging Industries: The Case of Electric Vehicles
Chapter 10. Substituting for Lead: The Radiator Repair Industry
Chapter 11. The Aerosols Packaging Industry: Product Concerns
Chapter 12. Pollution Prevention Voluntarism: The Example of 3M
Conclusion: Barriers and Opportunities for Pollution Prevention
 
Glossary of Acronyms
Index