Government Regulation

The manufacturing, processing, and use of chemicals, materials, tools, machinery, and equipment in industrial, construction, mining, and agricultural workplaces are often accompanied by environmental, health, and safety hazards and risks. Occupational and environmental factors cause or exacerbate major diseases of the respiratory, cardiovascular, reproductive, and nervous system and cause systemic poisoning and some cancers and birth defects. Occupational and environmental disease and injury place heavy economic and social burdens on workers, employers, citizens, and taxpayers. Because voluntary efforts in the unregulated market have not succeeded historically in reducing the incidence of these diseases and injuries, government intervention into the activities of the private sector has been demanded by citizens, consumers, and workers. This intervention takes the form of the regulation of environmental health and safety hazards through standard setting, enforcement, and transfer of information. This chapter addresses the major regulatory systems (or regimes) designed to protect public and worker health from chemicals discharged from sources that pollute the air, water, ground, and workplace. The setting of standards and other legal requirements in these regulatory regimes has occurred over a more than 30-year period that has seen changes in the use of scientific and technical information in regulatory initiatives and in legal doctrine, including the manner in which science, economics, and technological capability are viewed by the courts. The concepts of risk assessment, cost–benefit analysis, and technology forcing have evolved—both through the development of case law and through changes in the political environment. Often, changes in one of the regulatory regimes has affected the other regulatory regimes as well. Several themes run through the discussion of the different regulatory systems: distinctions between performance and design/specification standards∗; differences in the extent to which economics or cost are taken into account in the setting and enforcement of standards; and distinctions between interventions that encourage technological innovation and those that encourage diffusion of existing technologies.