Regulation and monitoring

This section is an excerpt from Regulation and monitoring of pollution.[edit]

To protect the environment from the adverse effects of pollution, many nations worldwide have
enacted legislation to regulate various types of pollution as well as to mitigate the adverse effects
of pollution. At the local level, regulation usually is supervised by environmental agencies or the
broader public health system. Different jurisdictions often have different levels regulation and
policy choices about pollution. Historically, polluters will lobby governments in less economically
developed areas or countries to maintain lax regulation in order to protect industrialisation at the
cost of human and environmental health.[citation needed]
The modern environmental regulatory environment has its origins in the United States with the
beginning of industrial regulations around Air and Water pollution connected to industry and
mining during the 1960s and 1970s.[64]
Because many of pollutants have trans-boundary impacts, the UN and other treaty bodies have
been used to regulate pollutants that circulate as air pollution, water pollution or trade in wastes.
Early international agreements were successful at addressing Global Environmental issues, such
as Montreal Protocol, which banned Ozone depleting chemicals in 1987, with more recent
agreements focusing on broader, more widely dispersed chemicals such as persistent organic
pollutants in the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants created in 2001, such
as PCBs, and the Kyoto Protocol in 1997 which initiated collaboration on addressing greenhouse
gases to mitigate climate change. Governments, NPOs, research groups, and citizen
scientists monitor pollution with an expanding list of low-cost pollution monitoring tools. [65][66]

Control

A litter trap catches floating waste in the Yarra River, east-

central Victoria, Australia. Air pollution control system,

known as a thermal oxidizer, decomposes hazard gases from industrial air streams at a
factory in the United States. A dust
collector in Pristina, Kosovo
Pollution control is a term used in environmental management. It refers to the control
of emissions and effluents into air, water or soil. Without pollution control, the waste products
from overconsumption, heating, agriculture, mining, manufacturing, transportation and other
human activities, whether they accumulate or disperse, will degrade the environment. In the
hierarchy of controls, pollution prevention and waste minimization are more desirable than
pollution control. In the field of land development, low impact development is a similar technique
for the prevention of urban runoff.
Policy, law and monitoring/transparency/life-cycle assessment-attached economics could be
developed and enforced to control pollution.[67] A review concluded that there is a lack of attention
and action such as work on a globally supported "formal science–policy interface", e.g. to
"inform intervention, influence research, and guide funding".[6]
In September 2023 a Global Framework on Chemicals aiming to reduce pollution was agreed
during an international conference in Bonn, Germany. The framework includes 28 targets, for
example, to “end the use of hazardous pesticides in agriculture where the risks have not been
managed” by 2035.[68]
Practices
 Recycling
 Reusing
 Waste minimisation
 Mitigating
 Pollution prevention
 Compost