The vast bay and watershed include the largest estuary in the country. Efforts to restore its vastly degraded water quality involve a commensurately large response by the Bay States, the federal Environmental Protection Agency, local governments, and the public.
It’s not the material injected underground to release shale gas — it’s the dangerous fluid and gases that come back to the surface. The lost opportunity to perform a thorough evaluation of the potential adverse health consequences of fracking has hurt the industry.
This report analyzes the current state of several specific types of environmental liability and how managers might react to information about potential environmental liability. The report then describes the management and accounting systems typically used to provide managers with information to be used in decision making and analyzes how information about liability is used in the various management systems and identifies some problems with the way this information is used by management.
The best way to regulate the release of mercury to our environment is through pollution prevention — placing a declining cap on the use of mercury in products and processes. Such a cap could limit mercury releases to 10% of current levels from intentional uses, and 50% of process emissions by 2010. This approach would be far more effective than EPA`s current strategy based on emissions controls, because it achieves dramatically greater reductions in total mercury releases, and reduces the problems of re-releases of mercury from wastes.
This report focuses on the Clean Water Act and RCRA, the two statutes currently under consideration for congressional reauthorization. Our analysis of these laws reveals that the major barrier to pollution prevention are not statutory in origin. Both the Clean Water Act and RCRA — without significant revision — provide substantial authority for promoting pollution prevention using a variety of regulatory approaches.
