ABSTRACT
The big problem with current environmental policy and environmental management procedures in businesses is that individual problems are tackled in isolation. The result is an unmanageable catalogue of single-issue demands and measures. Even by the mid-1980s, the Chemical Abstract Service had registered 8 million chemicals, mostly synthetic, 1 and well over a million must have been added since. Several hundred thousand of these registered compounds are in active use. Even if only 1 per cent of products cause environmental difficulties, this makes proper environmental safeguards next to impossible to achieve, regardless of whether the instruments used are laws, regulations or voluntary agreements in industry. Even enhanced resource productivity is only of limited help, as productivity gains primarily reduce waste, without affecting the number of products produced or the raw materials used. Fossil resources require a thicket of specific regulations which no-one can hope to enforce and which smother both business and personal lives in red tape.
