MANUAL OF ENVIRONMENTAL POLICY: THE EU AND BRITAIN

A chemical standard can be applied in any one of two ways – either to the contaminating discharge by itself or to the stream which has received the discharge. (UK Royal Commission on Sewage Disposal, Eighth Report, 1912)

When EU environmental policy began the choice between the two types of standard quoted above became the cause of a long running dispute between Britain and other Member States over water pollution which is still not fully resolved. The way in which, almost ninety years ago, a Royal Commission attempted to reconcile the two approaches is still relevant today and is described in Section 4.1. These two types of standard – now usually called emission standards and environmental quality standards – are not the only ones available for pollution control and several others have been used in Community legislation.

One result of the dispute is that the idea gained currency that the Commission and other Member States have a particular preference for uniform emission standards as the principal tool for pollution control, while only Britain has insisted on setting emission standards individually by reference to environmental quality. While this may fairly describe the positions adopted over the disputed part of Directive 76/464 dealing with particularly dangerous substances (see Section 4.8), it does not fairly describe the positions taken over the rest of the Directive, and it becomes an oversimplification and positively misleading once it is extended to pollution generally or even generally to water pollution. To argue that there are two approaches which are in some sense opposed, and that Britain has long been committed to one and the other Member States to another, is both to misrepresent British practice as well as to misrepresent the complexity and variety of Community pollution legislation that has been agreed by all Member States. This section therefore outlines the range of pollution control tools that have been used in Community legislation so as to provide a context for the discussion of the Directives in the chapters that follow.

Pollutants have been defined by Holdgate1 as substances causing damage to targets in the environment. The pollutant may be emitted from a source into the environment, through which it travels along a pathway till it reaches a target or receptor. The target may be man, or animal or plant life, or an inanimate structure (eg the stonework of a cathedral). It follows from this definition that if the pollutant reaches no target in damaging quantities because it has been rendered harmless either by being transformed into another substance or into a form where it cannot affect the target or because it has been diluted to harmless levels, then there has been no pollution.

There are, however, different views on the understanding of ‘pollution’. The most comprehensive definition in EU legislation is contained in the 1996 Directive on Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) (see Section 6.18), which defines pollution as ‘the direct or indirect introduction as a result of human activity, of substances, vibrations, heat or noise into the air, water or land which may be harmful to human health or the quality of the environment, result in damage to material property, or impair or interfere with amenities and other legitimate uses of the environment’. This takes the concept of pollution beyond ‘substances’, but limits it to human activities. In practice some pollution sources are natural, eg radon. In English there has been a tendency to distinguish between ‘pollution’ (causing harm) and contamination (simple presence in the environment)2. Thus a substance becomes a ‘pollutant’ if it has an effect in the environment. This is different from the German ‘Verschmutzung’, which is derived from ‘Schmutz’, meaning ‘dirt’. This blurs the distinction of the presence of the substances and its effects3. Different Member States may, therefore, have varying linguistic or cultural bases for understanding pollution, which may reflect their approaches to its control.

It follows that as the mere emission of a potential pollutant to the environment does not necessarily constitute pollution, the elimination of pollution does not have to require a restriction of emissions to zero.

Figure 3.1 illustrates the journey of a pollutant from source to target diagrammatically. To quote Holdgate:

. . . the concentration a pollutant attains at a point is the resultant of the quantity of the input to the environment (from whatever pattern of sources, at whatever distance), the dispersion characteristics determined by the properties of the pollutant (density, solubility, diffusion coefficient) and those of the medium (current direction, rate of flow, rates of intermingling, absorption properties) and the rate of removal from the environment at all points along the pathway, whether caused by physical or biological agencies . . . Where emissions of a substance to the environment are tolerated, controls need to be adjusted so that targets are not unduly hazarded (just what constitutes undue hazard depends on the nature of the target and the value set upon it).

Figure 3.1 shows possible points along the pollutant pathway at which standards or objectives may be set as tools for control. The points may be at the source, in the environment, at or in the target itself. For the purposes of the present discussion it is immaterial whether the standards are set with legally binding force or are merely guidelines, and the words ‘standards’ and ‘objectives’ are used in this Chapter rather loosely and interchangeably. When it comes to controlling pollution in the real world there is a vast difference between what is legally enforceable and what is only a guide, but these differences need not concern us in this Chapter.

Let us take by way of example a fairly common pollutant which is known to present a hazard to human health and examine the possible tools for controlling it.

Lead can reach human beings from a number of sources. Lead occurs naturally in soil and is taken up by food plants; lead is washed from the soil into river water, from where it enters into water supply and so reaches the household tap; lead is discharged to rivers from sewage works and factories; some houses have lead plumbing which may dissolve if the water has certain properties; lead is found in paint which can be chewed by children or it can flake and be picked up and swallowed; lead is emitted into the air from lead works and can be inhaled or it can settle as dust on food or on the soil where it is taken up in food plants; lead is put into petrol and is dispersed with vehicle exhausts throughout centres of population.

Some of these sources are natural and so difficult or impossible to do anything about, while others are clearly within the power of man to control. The pathways from the sources to the target include air, water and soil, sometimes in combination.

As part of its environmental policy the Community has agreed Directives which seek to control lead at a number of points along its pathways to man or other targets. Let us consider these under the headings of the different tools for control shown in Figure 3.1 starting at the target and working backwards along the pathways:

Biological standards