Environment
PART 1
October 6, 2009
Dealing with Environmental Regulations
In the thirty nine years since President Nixon framed the Environmental Protection Agency, environmental regulations have not only multiplied but have grown increasingly more complex. Unfortunately, our emotions about environmental regulations have stood in the way of creating solutions to the well documented problems of pollution.
Emotionally, we are pained by the burdensome cost and the intrusion of government into our business, and rightfully so. On the other hand we are also pained when we realize we can no longer eat the fish we catch. We may even feel a tad guilty over our stewardship of the good earth. Visit the following Texas websites:
www.tpwd.state.tx.us/publications/annual/fish/consumption_bans/
www.tceq.state.tx.us/cgi-bin/compliance/monops/aqi_rpt.pl
No matter what emotion is most prevalent in our thinking, collectively we have been locked into a negative frame of mind, providing only minimal ideas and solutions to the problems our clients face in this area. Meeting environmental regulations in a begrudging sort of way has prohibited the creativity necessary to engineer and design ways to better deal with these regulations. It is time for the engineering industry to move forward, and lead the way to a better environment.
One such area that needs to be addressed is how we need to quickly identify process lines that pose a threat to the environment (VOC’s VHAP’s). These lines have to be monitored on a continuing basis. Currently, in order to identify these lines companies spend millions of dollars each year re-creating master engineering documents such as the P&ID’s and devising other methods to identify these lines and then repeat the process every few years. All too often, on the engineering side, we conceptualize and engineer projects without any thought as to how our clients will know which lines to monitor or how they will monitor them once identified.
Understanding the complications our clients face in dealing with environmental regulations should drive a new effort by engineering companies to address environmental concerns in a way that enables the process industry to better deal with them. Process engineers and pipe designers would do well to get intimately acquainted with environmental regulations and embrace them. After all, they are not going away. Instead of waiting for challenges from our clients, I propose that we should be standing with answers and solutions in our hands.
The challenge is to make environmental regulations user friendly for the process industry. As more countries adopt EPA like regulations, the Engineering companies that tackle this issue today will be the global leaders tomorrow with all the benefits and profits therein.
Cheers,
R. Van Hudson
Leave a reply