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Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO): A Case-study in Partial Bureaucratic Adaptation

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 August 2009

Timothy O'Riordan
Timothy O'Riordan
Affiliation:
Professor, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia, Norwich NR4 7TJ, England, UK
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Extract

Best Practicable Environmental Option (BPEO) is an invention, peculiar to the British approach to pollution-control, that should have wider application than at present. As the British have developed the idea, BPEO will initially be geared to the mix of residuals emanating from specially-scheduled processes. The aim is so to integrate the residuals' stream that the ultimate environmental alteration is minimized in an optimal but realistic manner. The concept is polluter-orientated—not policy-, planning-, or environmentally-, directed—the aim being so to encase a pollution emitter in a single but comprehensive regulatory envelope that, ideally, best technology, best management, and best science, combine to produce the most efficient and least-offensive discharges.

This paper analyses the genesis of the idea of BPEO, and examines the influence of the growing power of European Community environmental directives on its development and interpretation. For BPEO to work, more fundamental reforms to UK regulatory agencies and legislation will be required. These reforms relate to greater openness and documentation, to a more participatory form of judgement with innovations in economic auditing, and to a more explicit accountability through Parliament and the courts, than are currently practised.

Bureaucracies adapt only slowly, however. So far the British have moved a little way to recognizing the realities of the BPEO approach, but nowhere nearly far enough. BPEO is a philosophy that is close to the practice of sustainable development. Placed in a broader planning and policy context, BPEO has great significance for ecologically-sustainable practices. However, that prospect lies beyond any present proposals for administrative reorganization, and only imaginative experimentation, led by an enlightened and determined private sector, seems at all likely to create the changes in attitude and procedure that would be necessary to incorporate BPEO within a practical programme of ecologically sustainable development.

Type
Main Papers
Information
Environmental Conservation , Volume 16 , Issue 2 , Summer 1989 , pp. 113 - 122
Copyright
Copyright © Foundation for Environmental Conservation 1989

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