Study of Environmental Regulations for Emissions to Air in the EU and the US, and to understand guidelines of regulations in the EU by considering a case of aluminum industry

Abstract

Climate change and high level of atmospheric pollution is a global problem that has taken on particular significance in recent years and will continue to grow in the near future. To deal with this problem, it is very important to adopt sustainable development practices in organizations day to day activities. The goal of sustainable development is to meet the needs of present generations without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs. There are three main pillars of achieving sustainable development: environment, economic and social, in this study the focus is on the environmental pillar. To achieve environmental sustainability, there is a large number of voluntary and mandatory environmental standards. These standards provide guidelines for making the environmental pillar strong. In this study, mandatory environmental standards affecting heavy industries in the US and the EU were studied and compared. Additionally, linkage of these standards with global and continental environmental treaties were studied. The study suggests that, the EU is somewhat ahead of the US when it comes to climate change regulations. For regulations concerning air pollution, the US is still the environmental leader and the policies in the EU are not always leading to the best outcomes when it comes to industrial environmental performance due to weak enforcement system in the EU. To understand the application of environmental regulations, the aluminum industry was selected in the EU. Main regulations studied were EU-ETS for reducing GHG emissions (climate change) and IED for reducing harmful pollutants entering the atmosphere (air pollution). For EU-ETS, methods for quantification of GHG emissions were studied. For IED, monitoring methodology and emission limit values of different pollutants based on the use of best available technology was studied. The study suggests that there exists a good framework within these regulations for reducing GHG emissions and other harmful pollutants from entering into the atmosphere in the EU from aluminum industry. Finally, it has been demonstrated that reporting of organizations performance on environmental sustainability is important for both internal and external stakeholders. Therefore, effort is made to understand internal reporting mechanisms and processes in the organizations. Also, a detailed analysis was done for the monitoring and reporting process under the IED. The result from this analysis can be used to constitute a system design for implementing monitoring and reporting process of IED on software systems.