The Polluter Pays Principle and Waste Management

Everyone must do their part in the prevention, reduction and clean-up of pollution, and large companies and industries are not spared from this obligation. When industries are creating large amounts of pollution, the government makes them pay for the damage they have done to the environment and for the control and prevention of future pollution. The money that the government makes them pay is part of a principle enforced by the government called the polluter pays principle (as discussed in Sharon Beder’s “Principles and Policies”). This is a concept that is discussed in the blog “Pollution partners not all paragons” written by Ellen Ley on November 22, 2009. Ley talks about the new rules being enforced in Indiana, which state that industries, companies and households that are producing pollution, must pay the government for damage control and to prevent further harm to the environment. Many large companies are talked about in the blog and they are criticized for being big polluters. They have had to pay money to the government for the amount of pollution they have created. Some of these companies include Duke Energy, General Motors and BP products.

The polluter pays principle is enforced in a strict sense which means that the polluter must pay for the cost of pollution control equipment, the cost of government infrastructure and services for the reduction of pollution, and in some cases for the administration for the government to oversee pollution control. The pollution pays principle is a sort of economic incentive because the companies are allowed to diminish their pollution however they want, but they must pay money if they do not reduce it enough. The companies mentioned by Ley were among the top 25 companies and industries that were discharging pollution into Indiana’s lakes and rivers in 2007. Because of this, the government is making them pay for clean-up of the streams and lakes and they must pay for new technology to make their companies and industries more eco-friendly in order for them to create less pollution. The companies mentioned were not managing the waste they were producing in environmentally safe ways at all, so they must be the ones who pay for the damage they have caused to the lakes and streams.

The largest steel manufacturing facility in the Western Hemisphere which is located on the shores of Lake Michigan has to follow the polluter pays principle also, because it is producing huge amounts of pollution. The steel manufacturing facility is called ArcelorMittal and it had put more than 200,000 pounds of toxins in the air as of 2007. Ley says, “All told, ArcelorMittal’s plants participating in the program have been fined more than $100,000 since 1997, according to the IDEM records” (2009). In my opinion, these companies should be forced to pay for the large amounts of pollution that they are creating because sooner or later someone is going to have to pay to have it cleaned up, so it might as well be the ones causing the problems.

The polluter pays principle works well for companies who are not managing their waste properly because it forces them to think about how much they are polluting. No company is going to want to spend more money than they have to, so it is good economic incentive for them to cut down on their waste and to handle it in cleaner fashions.

References

Beder, S. Environmental Principles and Policies- An Interdisciplinary Introduction. Earthscan, 2006.

Ley, E. Pollution partners not all paragons. A Greener Indiana, 22 November 2009. http://www.agreenerindiana.com/forum/topics/pollution-partners-not-all. Accessed 23 November 2009.