Polluter pays

The Water Resources Act 1991 relates to water abstraction and to discharges to controlled waters. It is administered by the Environment Agency who apply stricter standards than those required under the Water Services Act since the discharges are to natural water courses that have no means of treatment Usually the water utility companies have consents from the Environmental Agency to discharge their treated effluent into controlled waters. 

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The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has been a proponent of the "polluter pays" principle. What is the principle and how can it be implemented ... 

Created the Environment Agency (EAJ and the SEA for Scotland. Contains detailed provisions for dealing with a range of environmental issues including air quality contaminated land reinforcing the polluter pays principle water quality, with the EA empowered to require action to prevent water pollution and to require polluters to clean up after any pollution episode. 

Polluter pays principle (PPP) The term that relates to either the industry or the individual being responsible for the cost of all pollution-control measures. 

The cost of industrial effluent disposal to the municipal sewers is based on a polluter pays policy, which takes account of the quantity and pollution loads in the discharge. All the water companies calculate their trade waste charges in accordance with ... 

External costs have to be considered and included in prices in order to give the product their real cost. One way to include external costs is to follow the Polluters Pay Principle (PPP). The PPP state that the polluter should bear the cost of policy... 

For all future activities, and in order to achieve sustainable management of water resources, including related soil and sediment compartments, the strategy to be followed should involve (i) the precautionary principle, (ii) polluter pays principle and (iii) application of the best available techniques (BATs) and best environmental practices, including where appropriate, clean technologies. 

Supporters claim that CERCLA and the court rulings promote economic efficiency because they internalize externalities they make "polluters" pay. Such reasoning has an economic basis only when companies did not practice due care (i.e., utilize disposal practices whose benefits exceeded costs at the time of disposal). Economic efficiency is about the present and the future, not about the past. What should be done about sunk costs or past behavior is not an economic question except insofar as those policies that pay for sunk costs might affect current and future decisions. 

This index could be considered as a tool to calculate a fine for each effluent in application of a "polluter pays" principle. Such a fine certainly bears relevance to effluent chronic toxicity and would encourage the reduction of toxicant discharge to aquatic environments. Furthermore, such a fine could be considered fair and realistic since it is based on a statistical approach that minimizes the loss of information. 

Finally, requiring firms to pay for the right to pollute is consistent with the polluter pays principle, which starts from the premise that the right to a clean environment is owned by the public from this basis, if firms wish to pollute the environment, they must purchase the right to do so from the public, rather than being given it for free. 

A straightforward tenet of the EC Treaty is that it is the polluter who should pay for pollution or harm caused by its activities or products. It establishes that responsibility for the causation of environmental pollution can be measured in monetary terms, but limitations in evaluating the effects of pollution (especially in terms of monetary value) severely hamper application of this principle. If applied fully, the polluter pays principle would mean that prices of all products would reflect the full cost of production and consumption, including the environmental cost [220]. In this way, final consumer use of products would be the considered to be polluting activities. 

Recommendation on the Application of the Polluter-Pays Principle to Accidental Pollution (C(89)88/Final). 

Polluter Pays Principle. OECD Council says that those causing pollution should pay the costs. 

Three basic principles have emerged as common themes in these policies the Polluter Pays Principle clarifies who bears the costs for chemical contamination the Substitution Principle encourages the adoption of the safest chemicals and the Precautionary Principle promotes preventive action even in the face of the uncertainties of risks (see Section 3.3.2 for a more in depth discussion of the Precautionary Principle). Specifically, the new national chemicals policies of Northern European countries have relied on rapid screening tests for determining regulatory actions on chemicals, focused on products and product lifecycles for risk reduction, established lists of undesirable substances, and, in limited cases, employed government authority to phase out the use of the most hazardous substances such as lead, mercury, cadmium, brominated flame retardants and chlorinated paraffins (for a more extensive review, see Tickner and Geiser, 2003, www.chemicalspolicy.org). 

The courts of India have formally adopted a polluter pays principle, which requires that where possible, environmental contamination costs will be charged to the entities causing pollution. The Indian Supreme court has adopted this as a binding principle of law ... 

In the case of Vellore Citizens Forum, the Indian Supreme court clarified further that the Polluter Pays Principle as interpreted by this Court means that the absolute... 

By the Polluter Pays principle it may be expected that Union Carbide may ultimately be found to be at least one of the responsible parties. 

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