Environmental legislation associated costs

Beyond these indirect costs, there are future costs associated with new or more stringent variations of existing environmental legislation. We also need to recognize that all operations, especially those within complex industry sectors like petrochemicals, carry liabilities and exposures to potential catastrophic releases. Systems do fail for a variety of reasons, leading to unplarmed and sometimes innocent mistakes, that may result in third-party exposures for environmental damages or health risk exposures. These costs are related to legal fees, loss in consumer confidence, and subsequent losses in market shares for the products a company sells, as well as the clean-up associated with the spill or release. 

Every few minutes somebody in the world dies from work-related causes and every year hundreds of thousands of employees are involved from injuries during work activities. The potential financial devastation caused by the costs associated with accidents necessitates the adoption of an improvement process in the areas of safety, health, and environmental protection. During the last years high technological progresses have been made about safety and health in working activities. Even if the safety rules have became stricter and the concept of risk assessment is now well established and forms the basis of health and safety legislation, the work injury is still a big problem as it is clearly shows by statistics related to many terrible events. 

Just as the eommunity is becoming aware of the costs of corrosion, it is also becoming aware of the problems associated with many of the standard methods of corrosion prevention and control. Some of the developing areas of research to be described in the following chapter are the results of attempts to achieve effective corrosion prevention and control, and at the same time comply with the ever increasing demands of environmental health and safety legislation. 

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