Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
10
Economic and Regulatory Factors That Affect
the Phytoremediation of Groundwater
“Money makes the world go around”
Money Song (Cabaret, the musical 1966)
required where multiple users of groundwater pump from an
aquifer that crosses demographic and political boundaries.
The regulation of such a common resource has as its goal
a balance between economic competitiveness and the pro-
tection of the environment and human health from unin-
tended harm caused by the use of the resource, and ensures
that the resource will go to the highest use, such as drinking
water.
These centralized governmental bodies also can require
parties that access common resources not to degrade them
beyond economically and toxicologically prescribed limits,
and if exceedences occur, can require the responsible parties
to restore the resource to pre-impacted conditions. To ensure
compliance, regulations have the incentive that noncompli-
ance will result in the assessment of fines; collection of those
fines is termed enforcement. Enforcement provides the
economic incentive for the responsible party to meet the
regulatory requirements. Ironically, if the fine is low, it is
often considered economically advantageous to continue
resource degradation and pay the fine—in essence, pollution
of a common resource becomes a cost-effective form of
waste disposal. Hence, for a fine to be an incentive for a
company to not pollute, the fine must be higher than the cost
of waste-disposal.
The restoration of common resources needs to be
achieved through cost effective methods; not too high to be
prohibitive and not too low and be ineffectual. Where
resource restoration for a particular site falls in between
these two end members is the result of negotiations between
the responsible parties and the regulators. A common
complication that plagues such negotiations is the compari-
son of the value of money with the costs to achieve site
remediation. As a result, any monetary values listed in this
chapter, while reflective of relative values when written, are
primarily offered for illustration purposes only.
Many of our natural resources, such as air and water, are
considered common goods and, therefore, privately-
controlled processes that affect these common goods, such
as their extraction, production, and disposal, require state
and federal regulation. Many common resources or goods
are economically considered to be nonexclusive resources
because of the general inability for one entity to claim the
resource as being private property that can be excluded
from use by other entities. Conversely, those commodities
that are exclusive infer property rights, such that a price can
be collected for an economic gain from the use of these
goods by others. The scenario in which natural resources
are essentially beyond the reach of commerce is more
common in the United States than perhaps anywhere else
in the world (Randall 1987). This, however, is changing,
with recent trends in the privatization of water, as shown by
the growth of the bottled water industry after the 2000s, or
the privatization of agricultural plants by the agrichemical
industry.
The regulation of the use of commonly held natural
resources, also called rules of access by Randall (1987),
can be imposed by a body of stakeholders tasked with the
stewardship of that resource to guarantee the fair use of the
resource by all that wish to use it. The stakeholders can be
made up of an informal group motivated by self interest or
by a central government of generally elected officials. For
example, duck hunters who realized that overharvesting the
duck population would result in the loss of their sport formed
Ducks Unlimited to help regulate the number of ducks that
individual hunters could kill, thus preserving the current
duck population to ensure future hunting. For the more
essential resources, those necessary for survival and com-
merce, the government usually delineates the rules of access
to the resource. For example, such government regulation is
Search WWH ::
Custom Search