Environmental Management: Principles and practice

BOX 11.1 The polluter-pays principle, NIMBY and NIABY
Polluter-pays-principle
This principle aids pollution and waste control by ensuring that manufacturers,
agriculture and public realize and pay the full costs for goods and services, i.e.
incorporating pollution damage and pollution control costs into prices. However,
even within one country people hold different values so its adoption involves
complex sociopolitical and economic interactions, and implementing it on a
wider front, like the EU or internationally, is a challenge (O’Connor, 1997).
The agricultural sector is a major source of pollution in many countries
but has lagged in adopting the principle (Baldock, 1992; Seymour et al., 1992;
Tobey and Smets, 1996).
NIMBY and NIABY
The public are becoming better informed on environmental issues, and may
object to real or imagined pollution and waste hazard or nuisance. Special-
interest groups or the public can adopt a not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitude.
NIMBY is often invoked when authorities are proposing to site a hazardous or
‘nuisance’ waste or pollution treatment plant (Hunter and Leyden, 1995). The
reaction may not just reflect local views: some proposals are opposed by
environmental activists and NGOs wherever they are to be sited (for example,
deep underground storage of high-level nuclear waste) —a not-in-anybody’s-
backyard (NIABY) response.

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Too strict a control and business suffers and may relocate or go bankrupt; too lax
and people and environment suffer. The goal is therefore the best possible
environmental option (BPEO) (O’Riordan, 1995). Pollution and waste control are
now a significant force in politics (Weale, 1993), and ideally should be integrated
with economics, social and political policies (Haigh and Irwin, 1987).