Environmental Permitting Regulations - Essay Example

This led to the issues like less coordinated efforts to solve the environmental problems and increasing administrative overhead expenses. Also, it made the authorities to explore a regulatory regime for controlling all the environmental related activities and to integrate all their activities into a single frame work of environmental permitting. The significant change in this initiative is the integration of the systems being operated for licensing the waste management operations termed as Waste Management Licensing (WML) and Pollution Prevention and Control (PPC) (DEFRA, 2008a).

The environment permit is the authorisation given to carry out the operation of any proposed facility based on the permission granted to the operator subject to various conditions. The permit shall be the sole document which shows all the details including a map, plan or other description of site showing geographical extend of the site of the facility which must include all the information related to the facility. The broad aim of this Integrated Pollution Prevention and Control (IPPC) mechanism is to initiate appropriate steps to ensure a controlled release of pollutants to land, water or air by installing the best available methods and devices (DEFRA, 2008c).

Such an action would help to reduce the impact of the pollution caused, minimization of waste generated, prevention of accidents, energy efficiency of processes and better methods of waste recover, reuse or disposal. One of the most biggest advantages Environmental Permitting Programme are removal of bureaucratic bottlenecks leading to the reduction of cost and time of processing, ensuring continuous management of environment and human health and transparent transactions at all levels. A clear listing of industries that require a environment permit and those exempted from such a procedure is also explicitly stated (DEFRA, 2008c).

Thus such an initiative could certainly help to create better discipline on ensuring pollution norms by all the operators. As it is a single window based operation the possibility of evading the regulations shall also be averted and thus public can expect a better living conditions as a result of implementation of this rule in long term.Scope of environmental PermittingThe permit shall clearly specifies the details of the permission granted to operate the facility along with nature of operations allowed to be undertaken.

Further, the necessity of a separate permit for use of any mobile facilities is an additional clause to be satisfied here (OPSI, 2008). In case either any situations arise with contradictory set of practice with respect to the guideline given in the permit for the facility or when the operators fails to satisfy the pollution controls norms, the regulator could revoke the permit and would be re-permitted only after satisfactorily meeting the compliance steps. Further, if any multiple permit requirements arises, like usage of mobile facility on a regulated site facility, a consolidated environmental permit also need to be obtained.

Besides these, the provisions for variation and transfer of the already granted permit are also included in this framework. If the operator commit's a serious violation of rule, options to withdraw the permit is also incorporated by the policy makers under the new