(211b) Chemical Engineering and Environmental Policy

If you have attend the CCPS Global Congress on Process Safety focusing on HAZOP and PSM/RMP, read the Chemical Engineering Progress magazine’s Environmental Law for Chemical Engineers (Feb. 2012), or e.g., the CRC textbook, ”Air Pollution Control Technology Handbook,” you already understand that U.S. environmental policy is based in large part on chemical engineering principles. This is especially true for air and water pollution control regulation, hazardous waste treatment and disposal, site remediation and particularly hazardous chemical operations, such as those like the 1984 Bhopal incident in India, and the 1985 Union Carbide release in Institute, West Virginia, which drove the enactment of the 1990 Clean Air Act Amendments including the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act, and CAA 112r Risk Management Planning requirements mandating HAZOP and RMP. Chemical engineers are the best source for contributing chemical engineering expertise to any related environmental policy development process. Chemical engineers should be working for the federal government in developing regulations, working for academia conducting research and developing the scientific bases upon which regulations can be properly based, working for state governments or industry in implementing regulations and participating in the federal government’s informal notice and comment rulemaking process through state and industry collaboration with EPA. Chemical engineers should also consider going to law school and becoming environmental lawyers to focus even more on the legal side of policy making. This presentation will review all these aspects of chemical engineers in environmental policy making, from the perspective of a former chemical engineer and now senior environmental attorney, with additional perspective from the current administration’s impact on environmental policy.