Building a Better Dust Trap

For industries gagging on stiff regulatory costs, a decision last week by the Environmental Protection Agency was a breath of fresh air. Rather than fixing stern limits on the air pollutants discharged by each and every smokestack or other source in a plant, the EPA will permit state authorities to set a total on the gunk that the entire plant can discharge. This is called the "bubble concept" because environmental regulators will treat a plant as if it were contained in a bubble and all its pollutants emerged from a single hole in that bubble. By any name, the policy will go far toward satisfying businessmen's common claim that they can control pollution more effectively and cheaply if regulators simply set overall standards and let the businessmen decide how to meet them.

Under the bubble plan, a company can cut a lot of pollution from sources that are easy and cheap to control, but let out more discharges from sources that are hard and costly to curb. Plants in the same neighborhood can form a bubble and make the accepted trades among themselves. However, a firm cannot trade off the emission of a relatively harmless pollutant for a carcinogenic or otherwise hazardous substance.

The steel, utility, and other pollution-heavy industries figure that they will save 10% to 35% of their compliance costs. Du Pont predicts that the bubble policy will reduce annual pollution-control expenses at its 52 largest plants from $136 million to $55 million. Big companies have estimated that environmental control accounts for 77% of their federal regulatory costs.

Thus the policy stands to free up much investment money for new plants, improved productivity and more jobs. Regulators and businessmen agree that giving managers more freedom of choice will motivate them to develop more efficient, economical methods of fighting pollution. Example: the old regulations required Armco to install about $15 million worth of pollution-control equipment at its steel plant in Middletown, Ohio. Under a pilot project for the bubble plan, the company chose instead to spend $4 million to pave parking lots, seed other areas and put in sprinklers that will suppress iron oxide dust. These measures are expected to remove six times as much pollution as the costlier gear would have done.

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