INTEGRATED LICENSING, IMPLEMENTING AND COMPLIANCE MONITORING
JACQUELINE ALOISI DE LARDEREL
Director Industry and Environment Programme Activity Centre United Nations Environment Programme UNEP IE/PAC
1 INTRODUCTION
As stressed in the UNCED Agenda 21, the ability of a country to follow sustainable development paths is determined to a large extent by the capability of its people and its institutions as well as by its ecological and geographical conditions. Agenda 21 thus calls for strengthening national capabilities in order to enhance countries' abilities to devise sustainable development policies and strategies.
Development of a legislative framework is certainly one element of the overall capacity building. However, it is far from being enough, and constant follow-up of the implementation of those regulatory measures must be ensured, leading eventually to their improvement.
In this presentation, I would like to focus on the promotion of sustainable industrial activities, and raise 3 main points:
The need for an integrated approach.
The need for a permitting scheme based on environmental and risk assessment studies.
The need for compliance monitoring.
These comments are based on a report, "From Regulations to Industry Compliance : Building Institutional Capabilities"*, based on examples from both developed and developing countries, which the UNEP IE/PAC has just published.
2 THE NEED FOR AN INTEGRATED APPROACH
All too often environmental laws have been designed to tackle a single medium problem such as water pollution, air pollution, solid waste. But this division of the environment into separate media fails to recognize that pollutants move from one medium to another. A very successful air emissions reduction programme, for example, can merely transfer the pollutants to another media. Successful measures to treat water discharges could simply result in the creation of sludges that are subsequently landfilled, causing soil contamination and underground water pollution, not too mention health and safety hazards.
To enforce single medium laws, authorities naturally respond by developing a system of single medium enforcement. Inevitably, this causes a situation where those enforcing air pollution laws are at odds with those enforcing water pollution laws. Compliance with air pollution standards, for example, might lead to reduced air emissions but increase effluents for water authorities to deal with. A non-integrated approach also tends to encourage traditional, end-of-pipe controls (e.g. filters, scrubbers, cooling towers, electrostatic precipitators) which not only tend to transfer pollutants from one medium to another, but which, despite considerable investment costs, bring no economic payback. An integrated approach, on the other hand, encourages at-source, cleaner production measures, reducing the amount of wastes to be disposed of, minimizing energy and raw material consumption, and preventing pollutants from appearing in any medium.
A single medium approach also means that different agencies are inspecting the same plant, requiring facilities to fill our forms and provide much of the same information. This can cause confusion for a company not to mention added paperwork, duplication of effort and disregard for public authorities' administrative complexity and inconsistency.
To avoid these problems, the development of an integrated approach is indispensable. The single medium focus needs to be shifted to a multi-media focus on all releases of pollution from their source, namely industrial facilities. Such an integrated approach allows pollutants to be followed from one medium to another. One integrated permit can then be issued to each regulated facility, and integrated inspections can be conducted by a single agency - or at least real and effective coordination between media-specific agencies.
Even if the laws themselves are still developed on a single medium, the inspection (and the inspectorate organization) should take into consideration the total environmental impact of a facility and ensure that the overall damage to the environment is minimal. Corrective measures within the single permitting system should ensure minimum integrated environmental damages as the plant manager is stimulated to minimize the plant's overall releases.
3 PROPOSAL FOR A PERMITTING SCHEME, BASED ON ENVIRONMENTAL IMPACT AND RISK ASSESSMENT STUDIES
Once environmental policies and standards have been defined, a permit should be seen as a legal prerequisite to do business. Without it, or in violation of it, a facility should not be able to operate legally. In many countries, potentially polluting facilities now must receive from government an environmental permit (also called licence or authorization) before they are permitted to operate. The purpose of the procedure is to ensure a minimum impact of the activity on the environment.
Depending on their culture, their historical background, their overall legal and administrative context and their financial resources, different countries need to set up different types of permitting (licensing) procedures. But although the approaches may be different, they must all address the same questions: who should be required to have a permit; which government body should receive the permit application and which should ultimately issue and monitor the permit; what is the process by which a permit is decided upon; and what should be in a permit.
3.1 Permitting
Most laws contain licensing or permitting provisions for potentially polluting facilities. As all human activities are, in fact, potentially polluting, from a restaurant or garage, to a metal finishing plant or a chemical plant. Government has to set priorities using criteria to assess the importance of threats to public health or the environment such as industry sector, or type of activity, processes and chemicals used, size of the facility, location etc.
Depending upon the degree of potential threat to public health or the environment, two levels of licensing procedures have often been established:
large and medium-sized companies, or other facilities with potential high environmental impact e.g. those handling hazardous or toxic materials.
facilities with minor pollution discharges. These may not be required to obtain permits as their pollution levels are considered low. But they are generally required to notify the authorities of their activities.
The permitting authority may be at the national, regional or local level, reflecting the country's structure of government. In some countries the licensing authority may be the national Ministry of Environment, in others it may be at the provincial or municipal level, and in others it might be a specialized board, outside of the government. At any level, however, the permitting authorities need to be independent of political influences.
3.2 The permitting procedure
Based on the experiences from some countries, one can define essentially six steps in the permitting procedure:
planning - when industrial developers should contact the appropriate authorities to explore the environmental implications of their project
application submission
examination of the application by the authorities and consultation with the public
issuing the permit
notification of the permit decision to the applicant
publication of the permit
The permit should include the following elements:
a description of the corporate environment policy;
a general description of the plant a detailed map of the site and of the surroundings;
a detailed description of the manufacturing process which will be used (in some cases, part of this information will be considered as confidential);
the environmental impact assessment (EIA) which is the core of the application. It is on the basis of the content of the study that the measures to control emissions will be defined, and the emission levels set up.
the risk assessment study;
pollution prevention measures the company intends to take;
the proposed emission levels
hazardous waste treatment and disposal measures (including the name of the waste handling firm if the waste is treated outside the company);
schedule of the implementation of the measures to be taken, in case of existing facilities;
the emergency response plan in case of an eventual accident (per environmental sector in detail);
future developments as a logical consequence of the application.
proposed monitoring procedures to be used by the company, parameters to be monitored, frequency of analysis, methodology for monitoring a laboratory where the analyses have to be performed, book record keeping;
reporting procedures (how and to which particular authority);
the signature of the responsible officer;
Let me underline at this point one of the problems faced by developing countries authorities in checking EIA and risk assessment studies. Efforts are currently being made to transfer environmentally sound technologies. Schemes to provide decision-makers in developing countries with the necessary information are being set up such as the OzonAction Information Clearinghouse within the UNEP IE/PAC OzonAction programme and the International Cleaner Production Information Clearinghouse (ICPIC). Both are aimed at providing examples of currently available cleaner or CFC-free technologies, names of experts, list of organizations, and other sources of information.
Also, guidelines are being developed such as the OECD "Guiding Principles for Chemical Accident Prevention, Preparedness and Response", which are being reviewed in UNEP to broaden their scope to the whole world. But this is not enough; polluting technologies are being transferred between countries, resulting in polluting facilities. To avoid this, should not we promote a scheme for the export of technologies adopted from the Prior Informed Consent principles in the field of export of chemicals? This would help authorities in developing countries in issuing their permits and controlling their plant operations.
4 MONITORING COMPLIANCE
Once a permit is granted, it is essential that the government checks to make sure emission levels, hazardous waste disposal measures and other aspects of the permit are being complied with. Systematic inspection of industrial facilities is essential to ensure that the pollution limits stipulated in the permits are being complied with. If they are not, the government must then have the will and ability to take timely and appropriate steps best suited to its country (e.g. education, persuasion, fines, possibly jail) to see that its laws are enforced.
Verifying compliance involves systematic inspections to ensure that permit requirements are being met and that measures prescribed by authorities are being implemented. Integrated inspections, or at least coordinated inter-agency inspections, help to ensure that pollutants are not simply transferred between air, water and land. Inspections offer authorities an educational opportunity to help companies develop integrated environmental management systems. The first inspection is usually unannounced to determine the willingness of the plant to comply. Once a plant has established good standing, advance notice of inspections might then be given to facilitate information gathering (in some countries, however, all inspections are unannounced, although companies in good standing may be inspected less frequently). Some degree of organizational independence from the government body issuing the permits is necessary to ensure unbiased and effective monitoring of compliance.
Overall tasks performed by an inspectorate differ from country to country but may include all or some of the following: advising companies on permit requirements, in some cases issuing the permit (although not by the same department which does the inspections), making inspections, follow-up to ensure that post-inspection requirements are met, keeping records, providing regulatory and technical information, involving the public in monitoring the performance of local facilities, promoting sound environmental management, taking and/or developing systematic enforcement actions when necessary.
5 CONCLUSIONS
At the Earth Summit, there was a consensus that environment should be seen as a production factor, not as a burden to the economy. As Dr Tolba, the Executive Director often underlines, development will not last unless it is built on firm ecological foundations. "Cleaner Production" is the key cornerstone in reconciling economy and ecology. "Cleaner Production" is the continuous application of an integrated preventative environmental strategy to processes and products so as to reduce the risks to humans and the environment. This approach brings financial gains resulting from the savings on raw materials and energy which end-of-pipe treatments do not.
Certainly, proper integrated control of industrial facilities is one of the tools to promote cleaner production through the use of better environmental management practices and cleaner techniques.
This is why we at UNEP believe that these efforts should be extended to all parts of the world, including developing countries. I congratulate US/EPA, the Commission of the European Communities and the Dutch Ministry of Housing, Physical Planning and Environment in organizing this conference for East and Central European countries and for enabling a few representatives from developing countries to also participate.
We hope that we can look forward to their support to UNEP in cooperating with developing countries to strengthen their institutional abilities to meet the needs of sustainable industrial development.
E11 (1992). Available from UNEPIE/PAC, Tour Mirabeau, 39-43 quai André Citroën, 75739 Paris Cedex 15, France. Fax (33-1) 40 58 88 74. * "From Regulations to Industry Compliance", Technical Report Series N