Corporate environmental management and public policy - Bridging the gap

Environmental policies have brought dramatic improvements in air and water quality during the past 25 years, but further expansion of command-and-control regulations is likely to have diminishing marginal returns. Corporations are taking new initiatives in managing their environmental impacts in ways that reduce their costs, increase their efficiency, lower their liabilities, and enhance their competitiveness while reducing pollution, conserving resources, and eliminating waste. In the future, significant gains in environmental quality are more likely to come from widespread adoption of pollution prevention practices than from more stringent regulation of end-of-pipe emissions. Bridging the gap between public policy and the trends in private-sector management will require fundamental changes in federal and state governments' approaches to regulation. New policies must use economic incentives to encourage clean manufacturing and the adoption of pollution prevention technologies and forge public-private partnerships for improving environmental quality.