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EPA Invests in Business-Friendly Environmental Protection

Release Date: 7/29/1999
Contact Information: Bonnie Smith, (215) 814-5543

RICHMOND, Va. -- Reaping yet another benefit of the computer age, the U. S. Environmental Protection Agency is aligning its pollution monitoring records with the states it oversees. This eliminates bureaucratic duplication and saves businesses time and money.

State governments are leaders in integrated record-keeping. So to buy into their expertise, the EPA is giving $500,000 to Virginia as an investment in more economical and business-friendly environmental protection.

Mid-Atlantic Regional Administrator W. Michael McCabe explains: "For 30 years, environmental protection has been centralized under the command and control of the federal government. But now that we have solved a lot of the big pollution problems, it makes sense to move to an era of partnerships with the states and with good corporate citizens that will reduce costs and better protect public health and the environment."

The $500,000 grant to Virginia comes out of the federal One Stop Reporting Program, part of the Clinton Administration’s initiative to reinvent government.

Each grant -- Pennsylvania, Maryland and West Virginia were previous recipients -- pays for a state to align its records of pollution and hazardous materials so federal regulators can tap into the state’s database to make sure that federal laws are being followed.

This integrated approach spins off many benefits. It eliminates duplicate record-keeping, or worse, copying the same information from a state form to a federal form. It speeds up the reporting and compliance process.

And it allows a immediate, holistic look at all of a company’s environmental issues, from permits to discharge pollutants to lists of hazardous materials it stores. This kind of fast information can be critical to the health of a neighborhood in case of a fire or spill. And it can even help catch midnight dumpers through chemical analysis that reveals where and when a dangerous synthetic chemical was manufactured, and follows it from owner to owner.

This kind of integrated information also satisfies the public’s right to know about hazardous materials in a community’s air and water because computers make the data available at a glance, providing meaningful, real-time access to environmental information.

But the big beneficiary of one-stop reporting is industry, which will report its activities only to state officials, who will align the records so the federal government and the public can get easy access to the information. Over time, this will reduce industry’s paperwork burden, saving time and money previously spent satisfying an endless array of reporting requirements.

With computers, the reports can even be filed directly to the internet, further reducing the cost of doing business in a clean, earth-friendly way.