Article

Business and the environment - a delicate balance

Legislation and regulation, particularly that on environmental issues, is an area of growing concern to businesses. With the increased publicity which is being given to environmental issues by Central Government and at international level, we can only expect this to get worse.

This article provides some comments on the delicate balancing act that needs to be struck between the needs of business on the one hand and the importance of protecting the environment on the other hand. This is a particularly pertinent question for the Thames Gateway, where large areas of brownfield land are earmarked for future development.

However the question of environmental issues is far wider than purely redevelopment of brownfield land. It is relevant to note at the outset that businesses do increasingly take the question of the environment seriously. There seems to have been a public mood swing against environmental polluters. It therefore makes commercial sense, if nothing else, to comply with environmental legislation and indeed go beyond what is strictly required at the present moment (e.g in terms of emission / discharge levels) if the additional cost and effort are marginal and would pay dividends from a marketing perspective.

Much of our environmental legislation is driven by Europe. The UK, like other member states, is obliged to enact domestic legislation to give effect to it. However the EC directives themselves are directly enforceable in the UK and there can be occasions where discrepancies arise between UK law and EC law. In any event, the UK Regulations will follow the spirit of the EC law and therefore may be quite convoluted and difficult to understand compared to domestic law. A good example of this is the Producer Responsibility Obligations (Packaging Waste) Regulations 1997.

Waste deposited on land is another difficult area. Whilst the aims of the Waste Management Licensing Regulations 1994 are laudable, there does appear to be too much reliance on the strict wording of the Regulations by those whose job it is to enforce compliance. This is not helped by the fact that we are given to understand that individual Environment Agency officers have been set quotas for prosecutions. In any situation, therefore, where there is a good prospect of a conviction, there will be a temptation on the part of the Environment Agency to prosecute even if this will lead to both parties incurring significant costs and nothing being done in the meantime to resolve the environmental situation on the ground. The Environment Agency will also be particularly vigilant as regards waste emanating from sites in the Thames Gateway region due to the scale of the redevelopment planned for the area.

In conclusion we cannot help but agree that there seems to be too much red tape and that in some cases the enforcing authorities are more concerned with the letter of the law than the overall question of whether harm is being caused to the environment.

The message to businesses must be to ensure that they are aware of the environmental liabilities they are likely to face before taking certain actions. This will inevitably lead to higher costs and the unfortunate reality from the consumer’s perspective is that such costs will end up being passed on to them. However from the businesses’ point of view, the higher costs of ensuring environmental compliance from the start may well mean that they can avoid having to incur substantial costs sorting out a situation later when the Environment Agency or other regulatory body becomes interested, and who knows they may even be able to capitalise on their environmental compliance from a marketing angle too!

For further enquiries please contact Nick Horton (view full profile) on 01892 701313 or email nhorton@ts-p.co.uk.

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