Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution

The situation with regard to economic considerations has been so well stated in the First Report of the British Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (1) that this section contains an extensive quotation from that report. 

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. First Report, Command 4585, H.M. Stationery Office, London, 1971. 

This article discusses the UK Government s plan to make incineration with energy recovery play a larger role in waste management, following a report from the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. Recommendations from the report are included. UK,GOVERNMENT UK,ROYAL COMMISSION ON ENVIRONMENTAL POLLUTION PRODUCER RESPONSIBILITY INDUSTRY GROUP EUROPEAN COMMUNITY EUROPEAN UNION UK WESTERN EUROPE... 

Martin, I. and Bardos, P., A Review of Full Scale Treatment Technologies for the remediation of Contaminated Soil, Report for the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, EPP Publications, UK, 1996. 

RCEP Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Tackling Pollution - Experience and Prospects, Tenth Report, HMSO, London (1984). 

Before standards for indoor exposure to radon can be formally established, work is necessary to determine whether remedies are feasible and what is likely to be involved. Meanwhile, the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) in the UK has considered standards for indoor exposure to radon decay products (RCEP, 1984). For existing dwellings, the RCEP has recommended an action level of 25 mSv in a year and that priority should be given to devising effective remedial measures. An effective dose equivalent of 25 mSv per year is taken to correspond to an average radon concentration of about 900 Bq m 3 or an average radon decay-product concentration of about 120 mWL, with the assumption of an equilibrium factor of 0.5 and an occupancy factor of 0.83. 

The UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, in its report on Agriculture and Pollution, said ... 

The considerable inherent uncertainty in our understanding of the way that chemicals interact with the environment means that there will continue to be a risk of serious effects, as a result of the use of chemicals products, that we cannot predict on the basis of our current or foreseeable understanding of these processes. This requires a precautionary approach to chemicals management, and this is best implemented through substitution. ..We recommend that the UK Government adopt substitution as a central objective of chemicals policy." UK Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 2003 ... 

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2003) Chemicals In Products. Safeguarding the environment and human health, pi 65... 

SPRU (2002). A review of the impact of regulation on the chemical industry. A final report to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. University of Sussex, Science and Technology Policy Unit. 

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (2003) The long term effects of chemicals in the environment, twenty-fourth report Chemicals in products. Safeguarding the Environment and Human Health, London Sharma VP (2003) DDT The fallen angel. Current Science 85(11) 1532-1537 Schwager P, Moser F (2006) The application of Chemical Leasing business models in Mexico. ESPR 13(2) 131-137... 

In the UK chemicals strategy the statement The Government is very concerned that we do not have adequate information about the hazards of most chemicals released into the environment in large quantities is emphasized in bold in section 1.7 (DETR, 1999). The EU strategy states that The lack of knowledge about the impact of many chemicals on human health and the environment is a cause for concern (CEC, 2001, p4). The Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution held an inquiry into chemicals that reported in 2003. They consider that our failure to understand the interactions between synthetic chemicals and the natural environment, and most of all our failure to compile even the most basic information about the behaviour of chemicals in the environment, is a serious matter (RCEP, 2003, pi). 

Ramsey, F. P. (1931) Truth and probability , in R. B. Rraithwaite (ed) The Foundations of Mathematics and Other Logical Essays, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London RCEP (Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution) (1998) Twenty-first report Setting environmental standards, Stationery Office, London RCEP (2003) Twenty-fourth Report Chemicals in Products — Safeguarding the Environment and Human Health, TSO, London... 

Because of the first of these uncertainties (the extrapolation across species), assessments of risks to human health apply an uncertainty or safety factor of 100 to the experimentally derived no observed adverse effect concentration (NOAEC), in other words the NOAEC is divided by 100 to derive a no-effect level for human toxicity. This factor has been used since 1961, when it was chosen on an essentially arbitrary basis (RCEP, 2003, p22). In the assessment of risks to the environment, application factors of 10, 50, 100 or 1000 are applied to the results of tests carried out on specific species,2 depending on the species used and whether the tests were long term or short term. Evidence to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) for their report Chemicals in products indicated that these are merely extrapolation factors — they express the statistical variability of test results but do not effectively take into account inter-species variability, the vulnerability of threatened species, lifetime exposures or the complexity of biological systems... 

ODPM (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister) (2005) The planning system General principles , published alongside PPS1, www.communities.gov.uk, accessed December 2006 RCEP (Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution) (2003) Twenty-fourth report ... 

Third, as Prime Minister Tony Blair and Britain s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution have said, we need to cut our emissions by more than 50 percent by 2050 in order to avoid a dan-... 

Such incomplete discussions leave the public ill prepared for what lies ahead and for what our nation will ultimately be called upon to do. Britain s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution told Parliament in June 2000, There is little public awareness or acceptance of the measures needed to accomplish sustained, deep reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. 13 And this from a country that had already publicly committed to reduce its greenhouse gas emissions and to adopt many policies currently unacceptable to U.S. government policy makers. 

RCEP] Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. 1998. Setting environmental standards. 21st report. London HMSO. 

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). 

RCEP] Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution. 1998. Setting environmental standards. 21st report. London HMSO. Available from http //www.rcep.org.uk/reports/21-standards/document. Accessed 23 June 2009. 

Life-cycle assessment methodology has been used since the 1960s with early studies that focused solely on energy usage and solid waste issues. This focus continued in life-cycle assessments performed during the oil crisis in the 1970s.86>87 The unique aspect of all of these initial studies was the early development and use of life-cycle data inventories with less emphasis on environmental risk impacts of the associated processes studied. A method published by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution in 1988, employing the Best Practicable Environmental... 

Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Best practicable environmental option Twelfth Report, Cm 130, London, England, United Kingdom, 1988. 

UNCED (1993) Report of the Conference of the United Nations on Environment and Development (UNCED), Rio de Janeiro, 3-14 June 1992, vol. 1-3. New York United Nations, von Moltke, K. (1988) The Vorsorge-Prinzip in West-German Policy. In Twelfth Report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, Annex 3. London H.M. Stationery Office. Wagner, W. E. (2000) The Precautionary Principle and Chemicals Regulation in the U.S. Human and Ecological Risk Assessment 6, 459 177. 

A more detailed criticism of the use of tonnage triggers is provided by the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution (RCEP) in its publication Chemicals in Products [166]. 

S. Mahdi, P. Nightingale and F. Berkhout, A Review of the Impact of Regulation on the Chemical Industry, Final Report to the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution, 2002. 

Against this backdrop, new studies examining human levels of toxic chemicals -so-called body burden - are continually being published. A 2003 study confirmed the presence of 116 industrial chemicals, most of which are toxic in laboratory animals, in the bodies of average Americans (CDC, 2003). A similar study found even more chemicals in the body of nine volunteers of the 167 chemicals measured, 76 cause cancer in humans or animals, 94 are toxic to the brain and nervous system, and 79 cause birth defects or abnormal development (EWG, 2002). The United Kingdom s Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution has recommended that where synthetic chemicals are found in elevated concentrations in biological fluids such as breast milk they should be removed from the market immediately (RCEP, 2003). 

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