Environmental standard, implementation

Implementation plan A plan that makes practical provision to ensure that set environmental standards are met. 

Since the late 1980s, several developed countries have made major public sector commitments to build awareness of cleaner production, also referred to as pollution prevention and waste minimization. These commitments, most notably in Denmark, the Netherlands, the U.K. and the U.S., have led the private sector to investigate and implement pollution prevention measures for existing processes and products. As a result, cleaner production is now seen in these countries as a potentially cost-effective complement to pollution abatement in meeting environmental standards. 

After issuance, permits may need to be modified to allow facilities to implement technological improvements, comply with new environmental standards, respond to changing wastestreams, and generally improve waste management practices. These modifications can be initiated by either the facility or the permitting agency. 

Each law attempts to achieve specific goals by setting environmental standards for different classes of hazardous waste. Treatment technologies are researched by universities and companies and implemented by the environmental remediation industry. 

This chapter shows that other information must also be considered before an environmental standard can be implemented successfully. The implementation of standards cannot be a totally science-based issue technical, social, and economic factors must also be considered. Critically, as discussed in Chapter 2, the legal or policy context must be clear from the start, and a standard based on scientific knowledge should then be applied to a specific policy context. However, in most situations there are few data and an incomplete understanding, which leads to uncertainty in the standard itself and, potentially, to its application. This uncertainty must be accounted for if a standard is to be applied consistently and fairly (Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution [RCEP] 1998). 

The book presents an in-depth examination of when, where, and how to implement environmental standards based on the social and economic context. It includes detailed coverage of technical approaches that shed light on the derivation and implementation of EQS. It also identifies future research that will help to underpin the science of environmental and human health standards. 

Regulators use DNEL and PNEC to set health or environmental standards, but usually in conjunction only with exposure levels. For non-threshold effects, when a DNEL or PNEC may not apply, probabilities of the incidence of an effect for an individual within a population are used to set regulatory limits on exposure. Recent regulatory discussions within the REACH Implementation Projects... 

Figure 2 summarizes the basic difference between the 1975 national stationary source demand for low sulfur coal and oil, based on State Implementation Plan (SIP) estimates of that necessary to achieve primary ambient air quality standards and the projected 1975 supply of these fuels (6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11). The net result is a forecast coal/oil supply deficit on the basis of sulfur content and including foreign imports, of approximately 8 XlO Btu. This is equivalent to a combined annual shortage of about 230 million tons of coal and 300 million barrels of primarily residual oil. Table II shows the regional distribution of these shortages. In the judgment of the author, uncertainties in factors such as sulfur content analyses, production potentials, and the commercial impact of environmental standards by 1975 limit the accuracy of these supply deficit forecasts to about 20%. 

Therefore, since EU law requires that environmental standards be standardised, it makes sense to use the mean characteristics within the community to determine the Union-wide tax schedule. However, since the optimal policy requires some heterogeneity, this will require that the tax schedule be supplemented by locally implemented and enforced tax premiums. In this fashion, approximately the optimal amount of standardisation and heterogeneity may he introduced. 

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