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Pollution Prevention

Businesses have a large role to play in reducing waste, pollution and impacts on global climate change.
 
The best way to reduce waste and other pollution is to avoid producing it in the first place. Pollution prevention is any activity that avoids, eliminates, or reduces the creation of pollutants at the source.

The benefits to your business are:

  • Reduced operating costs
  • Reduced compliance costs
  • Reduced liability
  • Increased productivity
  • Increased marketability as a "green" business; and
  • Even possibly increased profits. 
Pollution prevention is reducing or eliminating waste at the source by modifying production processes, promoting the use of nontoxic or less toxic substances, implementing conservation techniques, and reusing materials rather than putting them into the waste stream.

Materials management and product stewardship

Product stewardship is an environmental management strategy in which all parties involved in the design, production, sale and use of a product take responsibility for minimizing the product’s environmental impact throughout all stages of the product’s life. The greatest responsibility lies with whoever has the most ability to affect the lifecycle environmental impacts of the product.

DEQ supports product stewardship principles and the product stewardship approach as a way to:
  • Reduce overall environmental impacts from the manufacture, use and disposal of products
  • Increase reuse and recycling
  • Reduce toxics and waste generation
  • Shift the cost of managing waste products at the end of their useful life from government to those who produce and use the products

Contact

For more information about DEQ's agency-wide toxics reduction strategy, contact Lisa Cox, Toxics Reduction Analyst