The progress of pollution prevention in San Diego County
- Dames & Moore, San Diego, CA (United States)
The goal of pollution prevention to reduce or eliminate the creation of pollutants through source reduction has gained popularity in the industrial and legislative communities. Corporations have instituted voluntary pollution prevention programs and are participating in government sponsored programs such as the U.S. EPA`s 33/50 program. In parallel to these voluntary efforts, legislation has been promulgated at both the federal and state levels which require industrial facilities to establish hazardous waste minimization programs and to include manufacturing activity data when submitting chemical releases reports under TRI. However, the success of these efforts on a county wide basis has not been established. This study establishes a pollutant prevention index that indicates that pollution prevention and economic activity are not mutually exclusive and evaluates the pollutant discharge trends in San Diego County, California from 1987 through 1992. The pollutant discharges evaluated include: hazardous waste generation, as reported to the Cal-EPA on the uniform hazardous waste manifests; air emissions from annual emission inventories; heavy metal concentrations in industrial wastewater discharges; and annual toxic chemical releases as reported on the SARA 313 Toxic Chemical Release Inventory. Economic indicators used as the ratio denominator for normalizing the pollutant data included: energy use, gross regional product, and value of manufactured product. The relationship of between discharges and economic indicators was analyzed using the Spearman Rank Correlation Coefficient. An evaluation of the raw data was conducted to determine which ratio(s) would be representative pollution prevention indices. Two ratios emerge as viable pollution indices. These are hazardous waste per gross regional product and toxic chemical releases per value of manufactured product.
- Research Organization:
- National Association of Environmental Professionals, Washington, DC (United States)
- OSTI ID:
- 125987
- Report Number(s):
- CONF-9506115-; TRN: 95:006735-0082
- Resource Relation:
- Conference: 20. National Association of Environmental Professionals annual conference and exposition: environmental challenges - the next twenty years, Washington, DC (United States), 10-13 Jun 1995; Other Information: PBD: 1995; Related Information: Is Part Of Environmental challenges: The next 20 years. Proceedings; PB: 932 p.
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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