Comprehensive versus Piecemeal Approaches to Environmental Control

In many countries the existence of a comprehensive approach to environmental control through the auspices of a unified control agency is accepted. In the United States, for instance, the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has received substantial support. Allen Kneese remarked that “while anyone who has observed the Washington scene for any period of time has just cause to be skeptical of the efficiency of reorganisation, one can still recognise the convincing rationale of this one”. In the United Kingdom a rather ageing and as yet unacted‐upon report of the Royal Commission on Environmental Pollution also proposed a “unified pollution inspectorate”, although some may consider that to be something of a misnomer for what may appear in reality to be an expanded Alkali Inspectorate. In a somewhat myopic way the Royal Commission saw HMPI (as it chose to call its unified pollution inspectorate) as an organisational change designed to bring State expertise on process technology to the aid of private and public firms who had potential and actual environmental problems. There is an almost implied value judgement that concentration of action “within the factory fence” must in some way be the optimal manner in which to deal with pollution. In contrast the approach of the EPA has appeared genuinely to encompass the aims of a truly unified control ideal, paying considerable attention to benefit evaluation, integrated environmental quality studies, control technology, control costs and their incidence.