In the United States, pollution is controlled mainly through laws and regulations that define violations as the discharge, emission, or release of more pollutants to the environment than allowed by the permit required of and issued to the individual source. For example, a source-based control may typically define the allowed parts per million or smaller for each chemical (i.e., concentration of pollutants), or the threshold may be absolute (e.g., total mass of a pollutant over a specific period). It is a violation for anything more than that threshold to leave the chimney, stack, or pipe. Most violations result from routine operational mismanagement and every-day illegal pollution from chimneys, stacks, and pipes from factories and other facilities. Violations of laws administered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA) rarely involve catastrophic spills. Because the laws are applied early and preventively, usually before there is measurable natural resource damage or harm to public health, pollution control in the U.S. is generally considered to be a success.
While these laws often are designed to facilitate the achievement of ambient or ecosystem-wide goals, the laws impose standards of individual responsibility upon each of the multiple sources within the regulated area. Because of factors such as pollutant dispersion and long latency periods before damage appears, often it is not feasible to price either the value of natural resources damaged or the cost of their clean up or restoration. Most U.S. pollution-control laws allow a violation to be proved and a penalty to be assessed without consideration or measurement of environmental damage or other wrongful economic externalities. However, such damages may be recoverable in private tort suits brought by individuals who suffer provable injury.
With routine reliance on source-based controls, USEPA is known to be an effective enforcer. Most regulated enterprises respond rationally, choosing to pay for effective pollution control and achieve compliance. They do this without suffering a direct USEPA enforcement action, but because they perceive its threat. In this way, a relatively small governmental investment on dissuasion or deterrence produces a large collective social return, as many permitted and lawful polluters chose to invest in compliance. The economic goal of a pollution-control law — to minimise unwanted “externalities” by having enterprises internalise all costs including pollution control in product pricing — is met when laws are feasible and the threat of enforcement is sufficient to motivate compliance. In this way, USEPA applies the concept of polluter-pays to all regulated enterprises.
Where non-compliance is detected, the polluter-pays principle is applied more onerously. USEPA penalties are added to the routine pollution-control costs to be internalised and paid by violators. For more information on U.S. penalty policies, see the case study on “Setting Appropriate Administrative and Civil Monetary Penalties in the U.S.” following Guideline 40(c)
.
For more information, see http://www.epa.gov/
ebtpages/complianceenforcement.html