Report Recommends Environmental Policy Overhaul
EarthVision Environmental News
December 28, 2000
CHAPEL HILL, NC, December 28, 2000 - With the new administration taking over at the White House, the US Congress has the unprecedented opportunity to revise, improve and strengthen environmental policy and management in the United States, according to a report released by the PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government. The study recommends a comprehensive review of federal environmental regulations, which have become increasingly difficult to implement effectively, and the adoption of an eco-efficiency approach through which the private sector would have more flexibility to use pollution prevention techniques to improve environmental performance.
The report, Rethinking US Environmental Protection Policy: Management Challenges for a New Administration, written by Dennis A. Rondinelli, the Glaxo Distinguished International Professor of Management at the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, urges the new administration to look carefully at beyond-compliance environmental management systems that corporations are adopting as the basis for a new approach to environmental policy.
"Many large corporations are adopting pollution prevention and eco-efficiency (P2/E2) practices that offer the potential for the private sector to move beyond regulatory requirements to reduce or eliminate pollution at the source rather than merely controlling emissions," Rondinelli says.
The report notes that environmental regulation is, of course, important, but environmental performance will not reach high levels under this type of structure alone. In 1990, Congress authorized the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to focus on pollution prevention. But federal and state environmental agencies have never been given the flexibility and resources to pursue source reduction as an alternative to emissions control.
Billions of dollars could be saved in federal, state and local governments in monitoring compliance, prosecuting violators and defending legal challenges to new rules and civil penalties if more companies could be persuaded to adopt pollution prevention measures says the study. The savings to companies of eliminating waste from their production processes would be substantial over the long run.
Rondinelli points to innovative programs in New Jersey, Massachusetts, North Carolina, and Wisconsin, where state environmental agencies work with or provide assistance to private companies to adopt eco-efficiency practice as models for federal environmental policy. He calls for a "new generation of environmental policies in the United States that can protect the public health and natural resources through pollution prevention and eco-efficiency more effectively, less expensively, and more creatively than relying on a command-and-control regulatory system alone."
Founded in 1998, The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government stimulates research and facilitates discussion on new approaches to improving the effectiveness of government at the federal, state, and international levels.
Copies of the report can be obtained from Mark A. Abramson, Executive Director, The PricewaterhouseCoopers Endowment for the Business of Government, 1616 North Fort Meyer Drive, Arlington, VA 22209, telephone (703) 741-1077; fax (703) 741-1076; e-mail: endowment@us.pwcglobal.com. The report can be directly downloaded in PDF from http://www.endowment.pwcglobal.com/pdfs/RondinelliReport.pdf, or via a link on http://www.endowment.pwcglobal.com/publications_GrantDetails.asp?GID=86.