with the law. It is to be expected that both would be eager to discharge their responsibility bY concluding contracts with private companies whenever they can. But since the system in its old form did not encourage private initiative there seems to be little tech- nical know-how of large-scale waste disposal in German private industry. The small enterprises (waste carriers, owners of dumps, etc.) are not favored by the law. On the contrary, there have been official statements to the effect that private garbage dumps should be eliminated altogether. It is not likely that these small business units have the capital and know-how to expand to the magnitudes which waste disposal on the basis of the new law requires.

How rare private activities are in this field is shown by the fact that any attempt of this kind draws headlines. A few months ago a private company, the "Stfidtereinigung Nord" in Flens- burg, opened a composting plant on the basis of a contract with the city of Flensburg. It was hailed in the profes- sional journals as a pioneer action, and the whole arrangement was called the "Flensburg model," obviously in the hope that other cities or counties would copy it. So far no similar case has been reported.

The only large-scale development pointing in the direction of modern recycling is the "Waste Exchange of the Chemical Industry Association " (Abfallb6rse des Verbandes der Chemischen Industrie) which brings together buyers and sellers of waste materials to be re-used in industry. It serves as a clearing center for offers and demands, but does ,not operate proces- sing or disposal plants.

Conclusion The new legal system for the collec-

tion and disposal of wastes in the Federal Republic of Germany is still in the process of development. Several states have not yet enacted legislation to implement the Federal Waste Dispo- sal Act of June 7, 1972. Still, it is clear that the new system will provide a framework for a more effective and more efficient national and local effort to solve the environmental and econo- mic problems of solid waste manage- ment. It is to be hoped that the private sector will take advantage of the opportunities provided by this legisla- tion for rewarding business activity which at the same time helps to con- serve and recycle increasingly scarce resources and protect against avoidable pollution of water,, land and air.

34

The U.S. Council of Environmental Quality

Views the Future of Environmental Impact

Statements

The National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 probably has been the most significant and influential single piece of environmental legislation enacted in the United States. NEPA, as the Act is called, declared a national environmental policy for America and established a Council on Environmental Quality to conduct studies and advise the President on environmental matters. Accompanying the declaration of environmental policy was section 102 (2) (C), which directed that "all agencies of the Federal Government shall... (i)nclude in every recommenda- tion or report on proposals for legisla- tion and other major Federal actions significantly affecting the quality of the human environment, a detailed state- ment by the responsible official on... (t)he environmental impact of the proposed action . . . . "

This seemingly innocuous require- ment has proven to be the linchpin of the environmental protection move- ment in the United States, providing legal authority for citizens' groups and interested individuals to take the govern- ment to court and insist that agencies ranging from the Forest Service to the U.S. Army consider the impact of their decisions upon the environment. Over the past five years, court decisions have filled out the framework ~anguage of NEPA with more explicit guidelines as to when an environmental impact statement should be prepared and what its content should be.

Among the duties of the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ), also a creation of NEPA, is assisting the Presi- dent in the preparation of an annual Environmental Quality Report. It may be a very rough indication of progress in the environmental field that since the First Annual Report appeared in 1970, each year's report has been longer than the last. CEQ's 5th Annual Report, a 597-page tome', was published in December, 1974. The latest report in-

Environmental Policy and Law, 1 (1975)

The requirement of preparing environmental impact assessments prior to major governmental action can prevent needless destruction of natural areas such as this.

cludes a great deal of interesting infor- mation about the gamut of environ- mental problems and possible solutio~as.

One chapter of the report concerns the develoPment of NEPA since its enactment five years ago. The chapter begins with a description of the process by which governmental agencies gradually have adapted to NEPA's requirement that they assess the en- vironmental impact of their projects, provides some statistics on the numbers of impact statements prepared, discusses judicial decisions interpreting NEPA, and describes similar require- ments of environmental impact assess- ments which have been adopted by

Environmental Policy and Law, 1 (1975)

many American states. One of the most interesting of these state laws is California's Environmental Quality Act, which has been interpreted by the state's supreme court as applying to private as well as public projects, so that reports on environmental impact must be filed for any private project which is subject to a permit require- ment - especially land development projects.

The CEQ Report's chapter on NEPA closes with a section entitled "Some Thoughts on the Future." This section discusses some emerging trends in environmental assessment by admini- strative agencies. Like many governmen- tal oversight reports, it is perhaps overly sanguine about the prospects of agency compliance and cooperation, but these thoughts as to future development of the environmental impact statement should interest both persons involved in the preparation or review of such statements and persons in other coun- tries who are considering the adoption of similar requirements.

"Quality of Environmental Analysis "Looking ahead at the next few

years, the clearest and most probable major advance is likely to be in the quality of environmental analysis con- tained in impact statements. At the time NEPA was enacted, there was little understanding of how to do environmental forecasting. There had been no substantial demand or major sponsors for this type of knowledge, and there were few people with a back- ground in environmental forecasting. Inevitably, therefore, during NEPA's first years, some impact statements were of poor quality and this in turn reduced the benefits of the impact statement process.

"This situation is rapidly changing. Substantial effort has recently been channeled into developing an under- standing of how to forecast the major environmental effects of government activities. Federal agencies, universities, industry, consulting firms, environmen- tal groups and others are working out methodologies for carrying out environ- mental analysis. For example, EPA [the Environmental Protection Agency] and the Institute of Ecology are developing substantive frameworks for the envir- onmental analysis of certain types of governmental projects, such as highways and sewage treatment plants. The U.S. Geological Survey is studying the inter- relationships between generic types of activities (such as construction) and their environmental effects. The

35

Environmental Law Institute and the International Biological Program of the National Science Foundation are focus- ing on types of ecological systems, such as floodplains and coastal zones, in an attempt to find methodologies for forecasting the impact of man's activi- ties on these environments.

"In addition to these long-term investigations into improving the quality of environmental analysis, a number of groups are working on methodologies and techniques for improving the quality of analysis in the short term. For example, CEQ, in co- operation with EPA, NSF [the National Science Foundation], and the AEC [Atomic Energy Commission], this year developed the MERES model, a tool for projecting the nature and quantity of air pollutants, water pol- lutants, solid waste, and land disrup- tion associated with different forms of energy production. This model (which is discussed in more detail in Chapters 3 and 6) should help substan- tially in the quantification of the en- vironmental effects of energy projects. Also this year, virtually all Federal agencies substantially involved in the field of energy - FEA [Federal Energy Administration], AEC, FPC [Federal Power Commission], Interior, EPA, and CEQ - are jointly sponsoring a contract to develop a reference document con- taining the latest information on the environmental effects of every type of

- energy system. This document will be used in the development of impact statements for comparing a proposed action with the alternatives available.

"These efforts and others like them will result in increased ability to prepare useful and accurate environmental forecasts ....

"Scope of Environmental Analysis

"Impact statements usually analyze the initial or primary effects of a pro- ject, but they very often ignore the

36

secondary or induced effects. A new highway located in a rural area may directly cause increased air pollution as a primary effect. But the highway may also induce residential and industrial growth, which may in turn create substantial pressures on available water supplies, sewage treatment facilities, and so forth. For many projects, these secondary or induced effects may be more significant than the project's primary effects.

"It has taken several years to recog- nize this shortcoming in the analysis contained in many impact statements. The problem now is to develop better methodologies for predicting secondary impacts. During this past year CEQ sponsored studies which investigated the secondary environmental effects likely to result from the establishment of deep- water ports and from the drilling for oil and gas on the outer continental shelf. These studies looked at the onshore development, such as the construction of oil refineries and petrochemical corn-. plexes, which were likely to result from offshore activities and sketched out the environmental effects of the onshore development.

"CEQ is also sponsoring, in coopera- tion with EPA and HUD [Department of Housing and Urban Development], an analysis of the secondary effects of public infrastructure projects, such as highways and sewage treatment plants. The purpose of this study is to help develop a framework for predicting what patterns of land development may result from such infrastructure projects and what the environmental effects of the different land development patterns may be.

"While the analysis of secondary effects is often more difficult than defining the first-order physical effects, it is also indispensable. If impact state- ments are to be useful, they must ad- dress the major environmental problems likely to be created by a project. State- ments that do not address themselves to these major problems are increasingly likely to be viewed as inadequate. As experience is gained in defining and understanding these secondary effects, new methodologies are likely to develop for forecasting them, and the usefulness of impact statements will increase.

"Timing of the Preparation of Impact Statements

"Compliance with the letter of NEPA (rather than its spirit) requires an agency, at a single point in the develop-

ment of a project, to prepare an en- vironmental analysis. But having the analysis available at a late date is not very helpful to the planning of a pro- ject. Rather, an environmental analysis needs to be prepared as a rough approxi- mation during the initial planning of a project and then gradually refined as the planning of the project proceeds and as alternatives are identified, analyzed, and perhaps discarded. In this way, the environmental analysis at each stage in the planning process is appropriate to the decisions to be made at that stage. The project can be scrapped if its environmental costs appear to be too great, without wasting significant resources. Alterna- tively, the project can be modified in ways which achieve the objective with- out entailing unacceptable and/or avoidable environmental costs ....

" I f environmental analysis is ap- proached in this way, the NEPA-re- quired impact statement emerges in the normal course of events. No formal decision on whether to prepare an

impact statement is then required, and the requirement for the statement does not bring about a jolt in an agency's operations. And the crucial goal of NEPA - consideration of the environ- ment in the planning of a project - is accomplished.

"As experience demonstrates the benefits which environmental analysis can bring to the design of a project, the Council expects this alternative ap- proach will increasingly replace the current one-shot impact statement method.

"Size of Impact Statements

"In the future it seems quite possible that the size of impact statements will eventually decrease. As the relevance of different types of information becomes apparent, the current approach of some agencies simply to catalog an enormous variety of facts should slowly begin to change. Many impact statements now resemble encyclopedias. They discuss the project's setting in overly elaborate detail and contain lengthy descriptions of all species of plant and animal life in the affected area. Frequently, this reflects a lack of understanding of what is important and what is not. As the crucial environmental questions start to come into focus, it should become increasingly clear that much of this verbiage can be dispensed with, thus helping to reduce the size of many of the statements.

Environmental Policy and Law, 1 (1975)

"CEQ has encouraged agencies to streamline their impact statements by focusing most of their efforts on a discussion of the environmental effects of the proposal and its alternatives. Within this area of focus, agencies should further concentrate on the most important findings or conclusions in their analysis. The purpose of the im- pact statement process is to help devel- op an environmentally sound project; it is not to develop a lengthy document which may obscure the major issues. Courts appear to be increasingly engaging in careful reviews of the legal adequacy of a statement and may be expected to reject statements which miss raising, and attempting to resolve, these major issues.

"Over the long term, as the level of knowledge of how to do impact state- ments increases, the cost of preparing them should begin to decrease. It may take several years for environmental

analysis to be reduced to a routine type of inquiry; some may argue that it could take a decade or two. But the efforts to improve the impact statement process point in this direction, and it seems likely that over the long term there will be a decrease in the cost of preparing statements.

"The Council has strongly encouraged agencies to prepare program statements. Frequently, basic policy issues in the operation of a program can be addressed only in an analysis which covers the whole program; at the project level, it is often not feasible to review these basic questions. In addition, preparation of a program statement may allow an agency to dispense with the preparation of impact statements on individual projects, provided that impacts at the site are not substantial. Even if such impact state- ments cannot be dispensed with, how: ever, they can often be reduced in size if the program statement already covers

many of the impacts. Thus, preparing program statements may help to in- crease the efficiency of the NEPA pro- cess. As the transition to program state- ments advances, the Council anticipates that the size and cost - and possibly even the number - of impact statements will eventually be reduced."

Canada Adopts National Emission Guidelines

for Curbing Industrial Air Pollution

Based on the provisions of the 1971 Clean Air Act, the Canadian Federal Environment Ministry's Air Pollution Control Directorate has undertaken the development of national emission guide- lines for approximately 20 specific industrial sectors. The Cement Industry Guidelines were pubfished in the Canada Gazette of 12 October 1974 and those for the Asphalt Paving Industry in the Gazette for 5 April 1975.

These guidelines are a result of work by a task force representing industry, and provincial as well as the Federal governments. They are based on "best practicable technology," are suitable for provincial application and enforce- ment and meet industry's concern for practicality in terms of technology and economic impact. In this way, the federal government hopes to exercise its leadership role in promoting unifor- mity of regulation across Canada there- by preventing the development of pollution havens.

S.C.

Tuning In

It seems everyone is getting into the act. Effective December 27, 1974, Part 87 of Chapter I of Title 47 of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations (dealing with the Communications Act of 1934) has been amended to read:

§ 87.201 Frequencies available

(e) 122.925 MHz, 6 A3 emission: For use only for communicating between aircraft, or between air- craft and aeronautical stations, when coordinating programs of Federal or State natural resource agencies, including forestry management and fire suppression, fish and game management and protection, and environmental monitoring and protection.

Hopefully this action by the U.S. Feder- al Communications Commission will serve the purpose for which it was de- signed: the increased protection of nature.

T.P.R.

Environmental Policy and Law, I H975) 37