Pollution Prevention

for cleaner production and products

Pollution Prevention is a "front-end" method to decrease costs, risks, and environmental concerns. In contrast to managing pollution after it is created, pollution prevention reduces or eliminates waste at its source. Once practices are in place, savings from pollution prevention continue year after year.

Pollution prevention (P2) is a multimedia approach to solving environmental problems, and does not focus on pollution in a single medium (air, water, or land). Well-intentioned pollution control and management solutions sometimes remove pollutants from one medium only to transfer them, and their liabilities, to another.

Adopting pollution prevention practices and technologies produces cleaner processes and products. That’s why it’s often called clean production. This benefits companies and the public by:

• Lowering a company’s operational and environmental compliance costs.
  
• Reducing or eliminating long-term liabilities and clean-up costs.
  
• Reducing workplace and community exposures to hazardous materials.
  
• Diminishing need for on-site storage, transfer, and management of hazardous materials.
  
• Reducing risk and cost of managing products at the end of their useful lives.
  
• Taking advantage of a growing consumer interest in nontoxic products.
  
• Protecting the environment and natural resources for society and future generations.
  
• Bringing P2 technologies to market for economic development.
  

The Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) provides an array of non-regulatory P2 services to Minnesota manufacturers and businesses—one size does not fit all for P2 technologies. Variations in processes and product requirements, even within the same facility, make tailored P2 assessments a must. Assistance staff provide candid discussions concerning emerging technologies, product design, process line efficiencies, viability of chemical substitutions, and help calculating return on investment so that facilities can get the job done. Is your business saving money and reducing waste through pollution prevention?