Manual on the Development of Cleaner Production Policies ... - Unido

DEVELOPMENT OF CP POLICY
MODULE 3: CP POLICY DEVELOPMENT CYCLE
SLIDE: Formulate a strategy for implementation
• Statement of policy principles;
• Development of a national CP policy versus other approaches;
• Review of other national policies to understand how strategies have been
traditionally formulated in the respective country;
• Familiarity with other countries’ CP policies;
• Broad guidelines for a CP strategy.
As part of a strategy for CP, Governments should strengthen partnerships with
industry and the business community. To encourage businesses to develop new
cleaner production processes and products, Governments should promote
flexibility through an expanded range of policy options.
Background
Once priorities, focus areas and objectives have been settled, the next step is to agree on a statement of
policy principles. While this reversed sequence may at first appear illogical, the rationale is simple:
any statement of policy principles must take into account needs and priorities, which have first to be
identified.
A strong and substantive statement of policy principles (and its related objectives) can provide a solid
foundation upon which to build a nationwide cleaner production programme. The statement could, for
example, express the intent and resolve of the Government to consider CP a top environmental
priority, and to establish mechanisms to transfer responsibility for monitoring implementation to the
lower levels of Government.
EXAMPLE
Statement of policy: Pollution prevention in the United States
In the United States, there has been significant effort on the part of the federal Government and the
United States EPA to promote pollution prevention. The Pollution Prevention Act was initiated by
the federal Government in 1990 and encourages the source reduction of all waste types. It
reaffirms that the preferred method of preventing pollution is to reduce the volume of waste
generated at source and that reuse (closed-loop recycling) should be performed whenever possible.
In this way, it is fundamentally different from off-site recycling, treatment, and disposal and is
meant to reduce the need for these measures. Treatment and disposal are to be viewed as lastresort
measures. Through the 1990 Act, the United States Government made pollution prevention
a key environmental policy for the United States and charged the EPA with developing a pollution
prevention strategy.
At this stage, a decision has to be made by the Steering Committee whether the technical policy group
will work to elaborate a formal proposal for a national CP policy document. Other possibilities
include: (a) building alliances to initiate implementation of CP in industry, or (b) integrating CP into
existing and new sectoral policies, or (c) simply including elements of CP and preventive
environmental management into existing environmental policy tools such as permitting, fees and fines,
etc.
Should the group decide to work on a draft national CP policy, it may be helpful to review other
existing national policies, to check if there is any traditional format of policy document. This is a
different step than policy review; in this case the goal is to follow the traditional local ways of doing
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