Issues in Facility-Level Pollution Prevention Measurement

Issues in developing measures of pollution prevention at the process-level and facility-level are reviewed, based on existing literature. Pollution prevention can be measured based on changes in waste or changes in materials use. The measurement can be further be adjusted to account for changes in production or may be left as an absolute measure, but choosing an accurate index may be difficult. A range of data sources may be appropriate to support measurement of pollution prevention, including a full facility mass balance, reported TRI data and facility materials tracking systems. After process-level pollution prevention measures are obtained, they can be aggregated across the facility to provide a facility-wide measure of pollution prevention. Several schemes to account for the varying hazard potential of different chemicals are described, but more research in this area must be done.